Savannah Resources (LON:SAV) Chief Executive Officer David Archer caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss their gold mineralisation announcement and what this means to Savannah’s timeline
Q1: I believe your company could be really excellent David, is that right?
A1: Indeed. We announced some really very exciting gold results today on our Gaddamah prospect on block 4. In terms of the headline numbers, they’re pretty eye catching; 60 grams gold, 9% zinc and 1% copper, the numbers don’t come much better than that.
Q2: You’ve got the new technology in terms of flying around, is this as a result of that or some older methods of finding the resource?
A2: Yes, sort of older methods, effectively, geochemistry. We’ve done a series of trench sampling over the Gaddamah strike lengths and we’ve got some quite long breadths of gold mineralisation; 5 metres at 18 grams and another 5 metres at 18 grams and 8m at 11 grams with associated zinc and copper, so really really very good numbers and this is all at surface, the question is the strike extent. The good news is there’s a historic drill hole underneath with very good results which reported 16 metres at just under 2 grams gold and 1.2% copper so it looks a very high grade deposit, new surface and it certainly suggests that there’s a real gold element to the block 4 story to compliment the copper story
Q3: So this is one of those “the best place to find new resource is to look where people have been looking before”? Is that right?
A4: Indeed and this area we have at block 4 has been a prolific producer of copper in the 80’s and 90’s, it’s probably the best part of the Oman Ophiolite belt. We think there’s a gold story associated with it as well and there’s a history of successful gold exploitation in the country, generally small deposits but very high grade. In the 1990’s, a mine to the west of us produced around about 150,000 ounces out of about 800,000 tonnes of ore so an outstanding high grade result for a small mine like that. We’re very hopeful that one or a number of these deposits with high grade gold might support an early gold mine development and these things generally have relatively low capital costs and very quick payback and highly cash generative so we’re very excited about the prospects for these particular discoveries.
Q5: So this overall to summarise, this is bringing forward the timeline in terms of Savannah getting its hands on precious metals and industrial metals as well and in terms of shareholders, there’s significantly more in the company than was previously realised?
A5: Indeed and in coming weeks with further announcements, we’ve been very active on the ground in Oman over the last 3 or 4 months and there’s a whole series of new results in the pipeline so I think it will be a very significance filled month for Savannah with both copper and gold results coming through on a regular basis.
