The prosperous gold belt in Western Africa is an area that in the past has produced over 250 million ounces of gold from large to low-cost mines. The Massigui project located Southern Mali covers over 1,638km2 of ground around the operating Morila Gold Mine. Since operations started several years ago, this world-class mine has produced more than 6 million ounces of gold at an average cash costof US$216/oz.
It is believed that most of the prospective ground has been explored and mined, and that the next ‘hot-spot’ is Ntiola. A long time ago some trenching and drilling was executed which resulted in ore-grade intercepts and at the time not much was thought of it. The first official drilling results for Ntiola are imminent and reports show that up until this point drill holes have been highly encouraging, with alteration like those in the high-grade Morila deposit.
The Morila mine operation is going to run out of ore in the next 18 months’ time, so the company operating is currently treating stockpile material.
The opportunity is to use exploration skills to chase up multiple gold targets and find resources that could have a significant impact if processed at the Morila mine. The Morila mine has underutilised milling capacity, meaning anything we find could feasibly be processed through its mill; negating the need to build additional processing infrastructure. That would equate to low capex and low development costs, which is highly significant.
