The Northern Miner May 28 2018 Issue

Page 1

NEVSUN: TURNS DOWN US$1.5B PROPOSAL FROM LUNDIN AND EURO SUN / 3 Geotech_Earlug_2016_Alt2.pdf 1 2016-06-24 4:27:20 PM

SPECIAL FOCUS

CANADIAN GOLD

Gold prospects shine across the nation / 9–14

VTEM™ | ZTEM™ | Gravity | Magnetics 905 841 5004 | geotech.ca

MAY 28–JUNE 10, 2018 / VOL. 104 ISSUE 11 / GLOBAL MINING NEWS · SINCE 1915 / $3.99 / WWW.NORTHERNMINER.COM

Rio2 to merge with Atacama Pacific M&A  |

Mine builder Alex Black will lead new firm

Guyana Goldstrike trenches Marudi ahead of drilling GUYANA

| Funded by $3.2M strategic investment by Zijin BY RICHARD QUARISA

G

rquarisa@northernminer.com

uyana Goldstrike (TSXV: GYA) has completed preliminary mapping, trenching and sampling at the Paunch area on its Marudi gold project in Guyana’s Guiana gold belt — phase one of its 2018 exploration program. The Paunch area is 1 km north of Goldstrike’s Marudi camp and accessible by road. It is 1.5 km north of the company’s Mazoa Hill gold target and 1 km east of its Marudi North zone. So far, the company has dug 166 metres across 12 trenches See GUYANA / 16

The planned pit areas at Atacama Pacific Gold’s Cerro Maricunga gold project in Chile.  RIO2 BY TRISH SAYWELL tsaywell@northernminer.com

A

lex Black and his team have built two mines in Peru — La Arena and Shahuindo — and in the process nurtured Rio Alto Mining from a $12-million company in 2009 to a $1.2-billion company at the time of its acquisition in 2015 by Tahoe Resources (TSX: THO; NYSE: TAHO). Since then the mining engineer has looked at more than 60 projects and companies for his new enterprise, Rio2 (TSXV: RIO), and the president and CEO says he has finally found what he’s looking for in Atacama Pacific Gold’s (TSXV:

ATM) Cerro Maricunga gold project in Chile — one of the largest undeveloped oxide gold deposits in the Americas. In mid-May, Rio2 and Atacama Pacific announced plans to merge their two companies in an allshare deal — Rio2’s first material transaction. Cerro Maricunga, in the northern end of Chile’s Maricunga mineral belt, is 20 km south of Kinross Gold’s (TSX-K; NYSE: KGC) La Copia silver-gold mine. “What we see here is a project that is analogous to what we built in Peru at La Arena, a low-grade, disseminated gold deposit,” Black says in a telephone interview from his home in Lima, where he has lived for the last 18 years. “This

deposit is much bigger and should be a more lucrative asset than La Arena looked like at the beginning.” Both deposits have a similar grade of 0.4 gram gold per tonne, but at La Arena, Black and his team started with a resource of just under 900,000 oz. gold, while at Cerro Maricunga they will start with more than 3 million oz. gold in resources (based on a 2014 prefeasibility study by Atacama Pacific). “We’ve got a good base to start from, and it ticked all the technical boxes in our due diligence,” Rio2’s Black says. “What the Rio2 team is good at is starting mines very cost effectively, with a focus on minimizing capex. The big guys all look at multi-hundreds of

thousands of ounces per annum and try to bring up the biggest possible project and inevitably come up with huge capex — that’s not us. We’ve been successful at starting projects small, and then financing expansion through cash flow.” A case in point is Shahuindo, which was a much larger project than La Arena. Black and his team kick-started that project and brought it into production as a runof-mine producer. When Tahoe took it over it built a staged crushing, agglomeration heap-leaching scenario. Black says the project Rio2 builds at Cerro Maricunga will differ from the 2014 prefeasibility study,

PM40069240

See RIO2 / 2

Metals, Minerals, and Society Keystone, Colorado, USA

Registration Now Open

September 22–25, 2018 seg2018.org

MILLBROOK: SET TO EXPLORE CUBAN BROWNFIELDS / 5

1-16, 23_May28_Main .indd 1

2018-05-22 6:35 PM


Turn static files into dynamic content formats.

Create a flipbook
Issuu converts static files into: digital portfolios, online yearbooks, online catalogs, digital photo albums and more. Sign up and create your flipbook.