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February 2015
MODERN MINING
5
MINING News
New Liberty gold mine heads for commissioning
Seen below is a recent view of the New
Liberty gold project site in Liberia, which
Aureus Mining, listed on the TSX and AIM,
describes as ”the most advanced gold mine
under construction in West Africa”. New
Liberty, which involves a capex of US$152
million, has an eight-year life on current
reserves and should achieve an annual pro-
duction of approximately 120 000 ounces
of gold over the first six years of its life at
an all-in sustaining cash cost of US$850/oz.
It will be an open-pit operation with the
processing route consisting of conventional
gravity and CIL processing. Plant construc-
tion was around 70 % complete by late last
year and commissioning is due to start in
the second quarter of this year.
The EPCM contractor is South Africa’s
DRA Mineral Projects, which was also
responsible for the studies on the project,
including the PEA and the DFS. Aureus will
undertake the mining itself with MonuRent
contracted to provide and maintain the
mining fleet. Already several 100-tonne
dump trucks and a 120-tonne excavator
have arrived on site.
Canada’s B2Gold Corp has announced a
significantly higher grade updated gold
mineral resource estimate for theWolfshag
zone located directly adjacent to the east
and north-east of its new open-pit Otjikoto
mine in Namibia.
The updated inferred mineral resource
contains 675 000 ounces of gold within
2,58 Mt grading 8,14 g/t gold utilising a
3 g/t cut-off. This inferred resource is below
a pit shell containing an additional 1,03 Mt
at 2,81 g/t gold (93 000 ounces gold) in
the indicated category. The previously
released initial inferred resource estimate
for the Wolfshag zone was 6,8 Mt at 3,2 g/t
gold containing 703 000 ounces of gold.
Mineral resources are reported within a
pit shell based on a 0,5 g/t cut-off grade.
Mineral resources located below and down
plunge of the shell are reported at a 3,0 g/t
gold cut-off grade. The reason that the
down plunge resource is still in the inferred
category is because the 2014 drill spacing
was designed to evaluate the Wolfshag
zone from an open-pit extraction perspec-
tive using a drill spacing of 25 m by 100 m.
As the majority of the Wolfshag zone is
now envisioned to be mined from under-
ground, additional drilling will be required
to infill the resource to the indicated cat-
egory (25 m by 25 m spacing). Engineering
studies are under way to determine which
portion of Wolfshag could be mined by
open pit and which portion by under-
ground mining.
B2Gold currently plans to commence
open-pit mining at Wolfshag in 2016.
The conceptual plan would be to blend
higher grade material from Wolfshag
with ore from the Otjikoto pit resulting in
an increase in annual gold production at
Otjikoto and improved project econom-
ics. The main Otjikoto open-pit deposit is
29,4 Mt at a grade of 1,42 g/t gold contain-
ing 1,34 million ounces of gold.
For 2015, Otjikoto is expected to pro-
duce between 140 000 to 150 000 ounces
of gold at a cash operating cost of approxi-
mately US$500-$525 per ounce and all-in
sustaining costs of approximately US$700
per ounce. Once the planned mill expan-
sion is completed in the third quarter of
2015, increasing the annual throughput at
the mill from 2,5 Mt/a of ore to approxi-
mately 3 Mt/a, the company expects
annual gold production to increase to
approximately 200 000 ounces in 2016
and 2017.
Updated higher grade resource at Otjikoto’s Wolfshag zone