50 / 84
48
MODERN MINING
January 2017
Top projects
GOLD
with backgrounds in the Zimbabwean mining
industry), who at one stage managed LionOre
Mining, whose assets included the now discon-
tinued Tati nickel mine near Francistown in
Botswana. LionOre was sold to Norilsk in 2007,
but many of its executives – including Truter,
who was GM of Tati – are now with Asanko.
Asanko Gold is essentially an amalgam of
Keegan Resources, a Canadian company which
owned Esaase, and Australian junior PMI Gold,
which owned Obotan. Breese, Steyn and their
co-investors in an investment group known as
Highland Park acquired an interest in Keegan
in 2012 after investing in the company, with
Breese then taking over as CEO. The previous
management had completed a PFS which indi-
cated a very high capex for Esaase of just over
half a billion US dollars but Breese and his col-
leagues were confident they could bring this
figure down substantially.
While Esaase was considered to be viable in
its own right, it soon became evident to Breese
and his team that combining it with PMI’s
Obotan deposit to the south – which had pre-
viously being mined in the late 1990s and early
2000s by Resolute Mining – could unlock huge
synergies and negotiations with PMI were ini-
tiated. The path to a merger was by no means
easy but by early 2014 Keegan (by then known
as Asanko Gold) had absorbed PMI and the
way was open to develop the two properties
in tandem.
“Our approach is based on staged develop-
ment of the assets, with the cash flow from
Phase 1 financing the Phase 2 expansion,”
explains Truter. “We decided to base Phase 1
on the Nkran deposit since it has a higher grade
than Esaase – and was also ahead of Esaase in
terms of permitting. Phase 2 will see Esaase
being developed and the mine’s gold production
Layout of the Phase 1 and 2
projects.
This recently commissioned Sandvik mobile crusher has boosted Asanko’s crushing capacity.