Savannah Resources plc Chief Executive Officer David Archer caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss their recent find of gold deposits.
Q1: There’s been a lot of speculation on Twitter over recent days about your company, most of it positive, but you actually do have some news today regarding high levels of gold anomalism, can you explain what that means?
A1: Indeed. We’ve identified some very encouraging gold results from the Gaddamah prospect on block 4 in Oman. I think the interesting thing about this is that the Oman ophiolite belt is very well known of course for copper. The good news is that it appears that some of these prospects on our block 4 project are also gold enhanced. That gold enhancement at grades of in excess of 1 gram per tonne, suggesting that gold could be a very valuable bi-product credit for any cooper-gold mine development in the area. One also has to remember that we’re getting these results very close to some prolific copper producers, the old lesail mine so it’s a wonderful neighbourhood and it’s very encouraging to see such strong results and we’ll be following this program up with further on groundwork to try and establish the real extent of this anomaly. Of course, it’s all supported by a historical drilling section, quite a good intersection, almost 16 metres, just under 2 grams per tonne with 1.2% copper so a very chunky, very valuable intersection and if that continues to be repeated, they are really excellent results and could underpin the discovery of something of real commercial significance.
Q2: Talking about commercial significance, what could this mean in dollars and cents if that’s something you can quantify?
A2: It is a bit hard to do that. What we’re finding here at the moment is multiple prospects on both blocks 4 and 5 and it really goes to support our overarching strategy of identifying multiple copper-gold deposits which in aggregate could support a new mining life in Oman so what we’re seeing at the moment is very consistent in terms of supporting that overall strategy. We are highly encouraged, we’ve got a great team out there on the ground at the moment and they’re very active, we’ve got a drill program underway on a couple of prospects at the moment and we’re looking at a round of geophysics as well, airborne geophysics on the coming weeks. It’s a time of high activity and we’re really at the peak of the exploration season in Oman before hot weather comes in to play.
Q3: Just to reiterate, how much did this new discovery beat what you were expecting to be there? Is that a fair question? By 50%? 30%? Is it beating expectations by a certain factor that you can tell us about?
A3: 2 grams per tonne is certainly way in excess of what we would normally expect in terms of gold associated drill grades with copper mineralisation in Oman, generally you’re looking at copper grades of 1-2.5% with associated gold anywhere between 0.2-0.4 grams. In this case there’s a drill intersection where it’s almost 2 grams per tonne so it’s many orders of magnitude higher than what we would have expected and certainly suggests that this is an area where there’s significant gold enhancement associated with the copper mineralisation which just means that at the end of the day, should be able to go into some sort of mine development, the value of each tonne of ore is significantly enhanced so it’s really a very encouraging time and it’s just nice to see that we’re talking both copper and gold in Oman.
Q4: So the doomsters possible caught on the hop with this news?
A4: Well, I think so yes. Certainly the overall sort of context of copper prices and general gloom about resources is probably not all that useful but the fact of the matter is that there is very little investment in both exploration and new mine developments and I think that is setting the scene for very strong copper prices and copper price increases which within a timeframe that we’re sort of looking at. Whilst conditions are pretty tough at the moment, this is exactly the right time to be doing what we’re doing and means that we should be very well positioned and well poised to meet strong demands of copper.
