MINING INDABA
MINING INDABA
GEOLOGY
James Gilbertson, managing director
and principal geologist – SRK
Exploration Services and John Paul
Hunt, senior exploration geologist
and Johannesburg Branch Manager
of SRK Exploration Services talk
about defining which commodities
to explore for, selecting jurisdictions
that meet risk appetite, and
understanding the minimum
exploration target size significant
to one’s business, and how these
parameters can then be matched to
an appropriate geological domain.
With the mining of gold in South Africa and Ghana becoming
more difficult, where will exploration companies turn to next?
There will always be investment questions based on the
(perceived) increasing maturity of particular mining districts,
changes to legislative frameworks, political risk or labour
disputes. These issues are not unique to established mining
districts such as those in South Africa or Ghana, but they do
become amplified in these regions. What these issues actually
represent are the competing needs of stakeholders, which
need to be properly managed; moving to new jurisdictions is in
some respects only a temporary fix to these issues. What some
of these new jurisdictions do offer is the opportunity to be first
mover in broadly under-explored terranes (with the added lure
of making world-class discoveries).
Increasing security issues in the Sahel and sub-Sahel regions
has stifled activities in Mali and Burkina Faso. Cote d’Ivoire is set
to pick up some of this slack with similar Birimian greenstone
geology to its Ghanaian neighbour, and a fledgling mining
industry that is already finding its feet with gold, manganese
and nickel production.
There has been a surge of activity across the under-explored
Arabian-Nubian Shield, with its demonstrated gold potential
and various entry points which include Egypt, Ethiopia, Eritrea
and Sudan. Despite historic gold production dating back
millennia, the region is still under-explored, and offers high
grade, large resource prizes.
The West Congo Craton represents another broadly under-
explored geological terrane. Production in countries like
Republic of Congo, Cameroon and Gabon has been restricted
largely to small-scale alluvial operations but with more
systematic regional exploration.
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African Mining January 2020
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African Mining January 2020 www. africanmining.co.za