Cora Gold announces maiden reserves from Sanankoro

West Africa-focussed Cora Gold announced the maiden reserves and the results of a definitive feasibility study for its flagship Sanankoro gold project in southern Mali on Monday.

The AIM-traded firm said its maiden probable reserves, based on a gold price of $1,650 per ounce, incluses total ore of 10.09 million tonnes at a grade of 1.3 grams of gold per tonne.

That would make for contained gold of 422,000 ounces, and recovered gold of 380,000 ounces.

Total waste would come in at 45.56 million tonnes, with a strip ratio of 4.61 waste-to-ore.

The definitive feasibility study economics, after tax and based on a gold price of $1,750 per ounce, meanwhile included an internal rate of return of 37.4%, a payback period of one-and-a-half years, and free cash flow of $228m over the life-of-mine.

All-in sustaining costs were set at $1,033 per ounce, with a reserve mine life of 6.8 years and an average production of 56,000 ounces per annum.

Pre-production capital was set to be $108m, including mining pre-production and contingencies.

Cora Gold said “detailed” metallurgical test work confirmed a life-of-mine gold recovery of 90.1% through a conventional 1.5 million tonnes-per-annum carbon-in-leach processing plant.

A solar hybrid power option was incorporated into the plant design, delivering savings in both operating costs and carbon emissions.

“The company is pleased to be releasing its maiden reserves and definitive feasibility study on the Sanankoro Gold Project, focussed on open pit oxide mining through a traditional gravity and carbon-in-leach processing plant,” said chief executive officer Bert Monro.

“The benefit of low strip ratio oxides is seen both in the mining and processing costs, and this has helped deliver a very robust project economically with low technical risk.

“We are confident that with additional drilling we can significantly add to Sanankoro's reserve mine life through both existing resource conversion and drilling the recently updated exploration target.”

At the same time as completing the definitive feasibility study, Monro said the company had been working on a number of additional optimisations with other independent technical consultants.

“The results of the optimisation work will be published shortly.”

At 1118 GMT, shares in Cora Gold were up 10.12% at 4.68p.

Reporting by Josh White for Sharecast.com.