JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Gold miner Harmony Gold is “thrilled” with the prospect of transforming its Kili Teke resource – the first new porphyry copper-gold deposit defined in Papua New Guinea since the Golpu discovery in the early 1990s – into a major new deposit.
Following the declaration of the greenfield project’s maiden resource of four-million gold-equivalent ounces on Tuesday, CEO Graham Briggs said the initial inferred mineral resource estimate for Kili Teke represented an “extremely positive” outcome from the project’s early-stage drilling.
The drilling programme of the copper-gold deposit on Harmony’s 100%-owned exploration licence EL2310 showed an initial inferred mineral resource of 128-million tonnes at 0.4% copper, 0.3 g/t gold and 170 parts per million molybdenum, containing 506 000 t of copper, 1.2-million ounces of gold and 22 000 t of molybdenum.
“The declaration of a maiden resource is step one in growing a magnificent resource base – one which is wholly owned by Harmony. Our exploration discovery cost is less than $10 per gold-equivalent ounce – one of the lowest worldwide,” Briggs commented.
The South African Mineral and Resources Committee- and the Joint Ore Reserves Committee-compliant mineral resource had been defined over a 600-m-long, 300-m-wide and 400-m-deep zone.