Aura sees multi-million ounce gold potential in Mauritania

JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Australian junior Aura Energy on Monday announced that it had secured rights to acquire two exploration permits in Mauritania, which were along strike from Canadian firm Kinross’s  major Tasiast gold mine.

Aura chairperson Peter Reeve said that the company’s technical team, which was well acquainted with the area, believed the two areas covering 175 km² were underexplored and held the potential for multimillion-ounce discoveries.

“It is almost an anachronism in these days of modern exploration to find an extremely underexplored Greenstone belt in a mining friendly country with such high-quality preliminary gold exploration results,” he said.

The prospects covered portions of the Tasiast and Tijirit Greenstone belts and had only been explored previously by one other company, which was forced to suspend activities in the mineral industry downturn in 2012.

Aura’s chief geologist, Neil Clifford, led the previous exploration in these areas. He had played key roles in the discovery of at least nine major mineral deposits in Australia, South America and Africa, for a variety of commodities including gold, uranium and copper. These discoveries included 20-million ounces of gold, including Sunrise Dam, and seven had subsequently become mines.

“The Tasiast gold mineralisation is in Archean greenstones with strong similarities in terms of rock types, structures and mineralisation style with the great gold provinces in the Archean belts of Australia and Canada in which there have been many hundreds of gold mines. In the Tasiast district there has only been one discovery, reflecting how little explored this belt is. Clearly, the potential for additional and substantial discoveries in the Tasiast district is very high,” Clifford said in a statement. 

The project was located about 200 km from Aura’s Nouakchott office and could be managed within the company’s existing management resources.

“We will not be distracted from our core focus in Mauritania, which remains getting the Tiris uranium project into production as soon as possible. However, we are very comfortable that, given our extensive knowledge of Mauritania, the association of our technical people with the project and the fact that it can be managed from existing resources, this presents a high-quality opportunity in a country we know well and rate highly as a mining destination,” Reeve added.

LONDON LISTING
Aura, which would pay $100 000 for the permits in four stages over a 12-month period, would consider a listing on London’s Aim market to fund the project. Other fundraising mechanisms, including joint ventures, royalties and work-for-equity funding, were also under consideration.

If Aura defined an indicated resource of greater than one-million ounces, the company would make a further payment to the vendor of $250 000. A royalty of $5/oz on gold and a 0.4% net smelter royalty on other commodities would be payable on production from the permits. This was capped at $5-million.