Savannah Resources plc (LON:SAV) Chief Executive Officer David Archer caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss the gold mineralisation at their Salahi 1 prospect and what to expect going forward
Q1: This morning you have released news that you’ve confirmed gold mineralisation at the Salahi 1 prospect. Can you just explain the significance of these high grade gold results that you’re obtaining in Oman?
A1: Just in terms of the significance I think the main point is that Salahi 1 is the second of two high grade gold prospects we’ve identified in block 4. The very encouraging thing is that there’s a successful model for high grade gold developments in the region; there’s the Rakah gold mine which produced around about 160,000 ounces of high grade gold around about 15 years ago so we’re very much following up on that Rakah model and hope to aggregate an overall resource that might allow us to go mining some high grade gold in the next year or two.
Q2: How did these results that you’ve published today fit in with the overall strategy of block 4?
A2: What we’ve really been doing, the main game, is looking at the copper potential of block 4 and it’s been a prolific producer, it’s produced over a quarter of a million tonnes of contained copper over the last 20 or so years so we’re very much focussed on copper. It’s clear that there’s additional gold potential as well so we see this as being a highly attractive region to develop, both from a copper point of view and gold point of view and is still remarkably under-explored for such a prolific region.
Q3: What can we look forward to in terms of the news flow over the next few weeks and coming months?
A3: Well importantly, we flew an airborne electro-magnetic survey a couple of months or so ago and the results from that survey are being interpreted at the moment. That will really provide us with a targeting map that will allow us to focus on individual copper prospects so we hope to announce that in the next couple of weeks. That’ll really provide us with a very key road map as to which copper prospects we should be concentrating on and that will involve through the ground activity and ultimately drilling as well. We’re looking at focussing in on the drilling of our Mahab 4 copper deposit on block 5 and we’re looking to start that post the high summer temperatures, something like August or early September. So it’s going to be pretty busy both on the copper front and of course we’ve been actively certain work on both Gaddamah West Gold and now Salahi prospect as well so there’ll be continued news flow coming out of the gold opportunities there as well.
