PERTH (miningweekly.com) – Junior gold developer Gryphon Minerals has agreed to divest of its Mauritanian assets in favour of focusing on its Banfora gold project, in Burkina Faso.
Gryphon on Thursday said it had inked an option agreement with Canada’s Algold Resources, which would acquire the Saboussiri copper-gold project, as well as the Tijirit and Akjoujt projects, in return for A$4.5-million, which included a 14.9% interest in Algold.
A further A$3.2-million in staged payments would be made to Gryphon on the achievement of certain milestones, including the identification of a 500 000 oz gold mineral resource at any of the properties, or 15 months after the completion of the transaction or the renewal of the tenement licences.
Algold could exercise its option within 90 days of signing the option agreement.
The divestment of the Mauritanian assets would allow Gryphon to focus on its Banfora gold project, where an updated scoping study estimated a capital spend of some $210-million would be required, with $85-million earmarked for the heap leach operation and $45-million for the carbon-in-leach (CIL) processing plant.
The optimised study considered the development of a two-million-tonne-a-year heap leach start-up operation, as well as the upside potential for expansion by adding a conventional one-million-tonne-a-year CIL processing plant.