Scoping study adds 12 years to Anatolia’s Copler gold mine

Even though a scoping study on the sulphide portion of Anatolia Minerals Development‘s (ANO-T) Copler gold project in Turkey looks at mining the deposit more than 10 years from now, chief financial officer Douglas Tobler says the study is extremely meaningful right now.

At this point, Anatolia plans to start with the easier-to-mine oxide ore, which contains 1.8 million oz. gold, by late 2009. That will eventually be followed by the less-developed sulphide deposit, which contains 2.3 million oz. gold, and would be mined over 12 years.

But now that the sulphide deposit has been deemed economic, the company just might speed things up.

“One of the things that we can begin looking at is what would we need to do to pull the production forward (five to six years),” Tobler says. “Ten years is far into the future but (the study) is significant because it sets out milestones and gives us a very good path to follow.”

The capital costs for the sulphide mine development are projected around US$161 million for processing facilities with an average cash cost of US$385 per oz.

If the company were to start mining the sulphide ore before the oxide ore has been depleted, Tobler says it would cost the Anatolia an additional US$10-15 million.

“You would have to add a second mill and possibly some tankage,” Tobler says. “But we would also have 350,000 oz. of gold production for the second half of the oxide life.”

Based on the scoping study, Anatolia would be looking at an 8,000-tonne per day open-pit mining operation.

The life of mine strip ratio would be 1.7 to 1 with annual production averaging about 189,000 oz. gold.

The study did not put a value on 8.5 million oz. silver or 70 million lbs. copper that the deposit contains.

“We just haven’t got the studies far enough that we had a high enough confidence level to know,” Tobler says.

The company will do additional studies to see whether the copper and silver could be extracted economically.