Orca drills Morondo in Côte d’Ivoire

Orca Gold (TSXV: ORG) has begun drilling its Morondo gold property in Côte d’Ivoire, as the company expands its exploration portfolio outside its flagship gold asset in Sudan.

“We’ve been keen on the area for a long time,” Orca president Hugh Stuart says of Côte d’Ivoire. “We did some work when we were in Red Back and working in West Africa and said, ‘If we had to go somewhere else in West Africa, where would we look from a geological point of view?’”

Red Back Mining drilled nearly 4,300 metres at Morondo before the company was acquired by Kinross Gold (TSX: K; NYSE: KGC) in 2010. Management from Red Back then left the company and later formed Orca.

That team is now reacquiring the property from Kinross in a deal covering 1,826 sq. km of permits and applications that will raise Orca’s total Côte d’Ivoire land package to 2,890 square kilometres. In anticipation of closing the transaction, Orca undertook a 2,500-metre drill campaign at Morondo at the end of 2017.

“It’s a program to see what we’ve got and then we’ll decide what the plan is once we’ve got the results back in January,” Stuart says.

Stuart and his team first dug trenches on the property in 2010 as members of Red Back Mining. Credit: Orca Gold.

Orca executed a share-purchase agreement in early 2017 with two subsidiaries of Kinross to acquire the Morondo licence and the Korokaha North licence.

As part of the deal it will also acquire five exploration licence applications: Korokaha South, which along with Korokaha North lies next to Randgold’s Tongon mine; Bassawa and Satama, which are on the southern extension of the Houndé belt; and Zuénoula Ouest and Zuénoula Est, which are northwest of Perseus’ Yaouré project.

Three other pre-existing applications bring Orca’s total Côte d’Ivoire land package to 10 permits. Upon closing the deal, Kinross will own an 8.6% interest in Orca.

Morondo is the most advanced property in Côte d’Ivoire that Orca owns or is in the process of acquiring. The company has made a point of entering relatively unexplored areas because, as Stuart puts it, when you find an area that “hasn’t really been touched before, you increase your chances of finding something good quickly.”

Mineralization at Morondo has a 600-metre strike length and a true width of up to 150 metres. Orca will use reverse-circulation drilling to explore at depths of up to 150 metres.

The property lies at the junction of the Senoufo and Boundiali greenstone belts to Côte d’Ivoire’s southwest. One of the best intercepts so far from Morondo is 66 metres at 1.53 grams gold per tonne.

Stuart says that it’s now a good time to get back into the country and look for more.

Drill rigs and artisanal miners on the Block 14 gold property in Sudan. Photo by Richard Quarisa.

“We were drilling there in 2010 and the whole place was edgy — it felt a little bit dodgy. But now the place is completely different,” he says. “It’s great. There’s a very different feel to the whole country.

“It’s a similar sort of stuff to Sudan. The geology’s really good and it hasn’t been explored seriously in the last 20 years for political reasons.”

Sudan’s political situation improved more than two months ago when long-standing U.S. economic sanctions against the country were lifted by President Donald Trump. Looking back, Stuart says he has seen an uptick in interest in Sudan from the mining community.

“I’ve seen drilling companies and I’ve seen other exploration guys,” he says. “People’s sentiment towards Sudan has relaxed. I think some people are a little bit cagey about it, but from a political and investment point of view it’s been positive.”

Back at Orca’s Block 14 in Sudan, the company has announced more positive drill results at its Galat Sufar South (GSS) resource. So far, 34 diamond drill holes totalling 12,450 metres and 12 reverse-circulation holes totalling 2,500 metres have been drilled as part of an infill and extension program.

The company also released more assay results to go along with the previously announced 15 holes. Of note, hole 31 intercepted 88 metres at 1.80 grams gold outside the current resource in GSS’s East Zone.

Nearly all the holes were drilled in the East Zone of GSS except for one, drilled in the Main Zone: hole 37 intersected 46 metres at 3.44 grams gold. At 299 metres, it intercepted 1 metre at 249 grams gold and 335 grams silver, including visible gold.

With the ongoing 25,000-metre drill program, Orca intends to upgrade in-pit resources to the measured and indicated category and test for expansion below the current pit shell as defined in its May 2017 preliminary economic assessment.

“We’ve done all the geotech, so the feasibility’s in full swing,” Stuart says. “And we’re now pushing to get all the assays back so we can revise the resource calculation in early January, which will then feed into the feasibility study.”

Orca intends to release its feasibility study in the second quarter of 2018. The company has a 67¢ share price and a $102-million market capitalization, with a 52-week range of 30¢ to 74¢.