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June 2015
MODERN MINING
43
MINING IN AFRICA
feature
countries – notably Guinea, Senegal, Mauri
tania, Niger and Liberia – have significant
gold endowments and in most cases produc-
ing mines. Of these countries, perhaps the one
that is most exciting in terms of new devel-
opments is Liberia, where Aureus Mining,
listed in Toronto and on London’s AIM, is
currently commissioning its US$172 million
New Liberty
gold mine. This is an open-pit
mine with recovery via conventional gravity
and CIL processing. DRA is the EPCM contrac-
tor for the 1,1 Mt/a plant and related works
while MonuRent has supplied and maintains
the mining fleet (with mining remaining in
the hands of Aureus). New Liberty, which will
have an average annual production of 120 000
ounces of gold during the first six years of its
eight-year mine life, is Liberia’s first modern
gold mine.
New Liberty – which has just poured its first
gold – is certainly not the beginning and end
of the Liberian gold story. Aureus Mining has
an active exploration programme underway in
the country and has been particularly encour-
aged by the results it has been getting from its
Ndablama
project, 40 km north-east of New
Liberty, while Hummingbird Resources holds
the
Dugbe 1
project, which it believes has the
potential to be bigger than its Yanfolila project
in Mali.
When
Modern Mining
spoke to Humming
bird’s MD, Dan Betts, earlier this year, he
described Dugbe as a virgin discovery made by
Hummingbird’s geologists and said it boasted
a resource of just over 4 million ounces of gold
at an average grade of 1,4 g/t. “This certainly
ranks as Liberia’s biggest gold deposit and, in
fact, is impressive by global standards,” he
said. “We completed a PEA in 2013 which
demonstrated the viability of a 20-year proj-
ect producing up to 125 000 ounces a year in
its early years and we’re now well advanced
with our DFS – which is currently under
The camp at Hummingbird’s
Dugbe 1 project in Liberia.
The project has a resource of
just over 4 million ounces of
gold (photo: Hummingbird
Resources).
optimisation.” He added that the DFS was
being prepared by a team of consultants led by
South Africa’s MDM Engineering.
While it seems unlikely that Liberia, a very
small country by African standards in terms
of area, will ever rival Ghana and Mali as a
gold producer, it is certainly not impossible
that it could get up to at least several hundred
thousand ounces a year of production – and
possibly more – within the next five years. The
country is generally acknowledged as being
under-explored so there are very real prospects
of explorers making new discoveries. Whatever
the case, the New Liberty mine will put the
country on the map as a commercial (instead of
just an artisanal) gold producer and also dem-
onstrate that it is possible to run a modern gold
mine in a country which until fairly recently
was regarded as one of Africa’s failed states.