The recent surge in the price of gold has revitalized exploration in Burkina Faso, a pocket of Africa known more for its poverty than for its wealth of mineral resources.
Burkina Faso first emerged as a popular destination for exploration dollars in the mid-1990s, when the West African country adopted a new mining policy to encourage foreign investment. But the depressed gold market in subsequent years nearly killed the fledgling industry. Several of the roughly 150 exploration permits issued during the brief rush for gold were abandoned.
Now a handful of juniors, encouraged by US$350-plus-per-oz. gold, are accelerating their work programs in the landlocked country, where an ounce of the precious metal is worth more than the per-capita gross domestic product.
Burkina Faso’s intense poverty is, in part, what makes it attractive to explorers, says Benoit La Salle, president of
“The people are motivated because they are poor,” he says. “This makes Burkina fairly easy to work in, compared with some other countries in the area.”
La Salle isn’t concerned about the civil war in neighbouring Ivory Cost spilling over into Burkina Faso, even though Burkinabes who have migrated to Ivory Coast in search of work are the target of much of the recent violence. “Ivory Coast is a richer country, where there is a lot to fight over,” he says. “It’s not the same situation in Burkina.”
Geology is another attraction. The Birimian greenstone belts that thread their way through the countryside are extensions of the major gold-bearing belts in Ghana and Mali. Advances in regolith geochemistry have allowed companies to pinpoint gold-bearing zones previously hidden underneath a thick blanket of overburden.
As a result, at least three gold projects have reached the advanced exploration stage, including:
o the adjacent Bouroum and Taparko properties, where
o the Mana project, where Semafo plans to spend $1.2 million on feasibility this year; and
o the Essakan project, inherited by
But with little history of large-scale gold mining (the country’s only gold mine, Poura, closed in 1999), Burkina has yet to develop a mining code that would encourage these projects to make the expensive leap from advanced exploration to production.
“Their mining code is not as competitive as some of the other countries, because they’ve never had mining before,” says La Salle. “Before we start investing millions of dollars, we have to be certain we have a good code. It’s a little bit dicey right now, but [the government in Burkina Faso] is working on a code that is competitive with Mali, Guinea and Ghana.”
And, like many impoverished African nations, Burkina Faso falls way down the line in terms of overall economic policy. “It remains plagued by political instability, poor governance, inadequate infrastructure and widespread illiteracy,” reports the Heritage Foundation in its latest Index of Economic Freedom, which measures policy towards, among other things, trade, foreign investment and property rights.
Burkina Faso scores 3.25 out of 5 on the index, lying between Canada (2.05) and Cuba (4.45) on the scale of economic freedom. This is an improvement from the mid-’90s, when the country’s score was closer to 4, but slightly worse than last year’s score of 3.20.
Low grade
Another roadblock these projects share is a relatively low average gold grade of about 2.5 grams per tonne. There have been no major discoveries of medium-to-high grade deposits since the Poura mine, with grades above 5 grams per tonne, was found several decades ago.
As a result, companies involved in advanced exploration are looking more closely at the high-grade cores of large, but other wise low-grade, deposits — Gold Fields, for instance — is spending $1.5 million on the Essakan property this year to increase resources from 1 million oz. to at least 2 million oz. by definition drilling within the core of main deposit, as well as by testing extensions of the deposit and other targets.
Gold Fields can earn a half-interest in Essakan by spending US$8 million on exploration, and a 60% interest by completing a feasibility study. “At two million ounces of three grams gold, Gold Fields would consider going to bankable feasibility,” says Ron Little, president of Orezone. “If the results are good, they can really turn on the tap and keep drilling.”
A similar effort by
Another promising project that needs either a higher gold price or a larger resource to proceed is Taparko, 80%-owned by High River. The junior is investigating the feasibility of combining the concession with Axmin’s Bouroum property, 35 km away. A joint operation could produce as much as 100,000 oz. gold per year, the partners project. Axmin is earning 65% interest in Bouroum from
Drilling at Mana
Meanwhile, Semafo is moving toward feasibility on its Mana project, where three separate structures contain an estimated 1 million oz. gold in oxides to a depth of about 75 metres. The company is spending US$1.2 million this year to follow-up the most promising (that is, highest-grade) targets and to prepare a feasibility study. Drilling completed in November 2002 intersected grades of up to 4.5 grams per tonne over 39 metres. Semafo holds a 95% interest in the asset.
But it’s not just the established deposits that are attracting attention. Orezone is encouraged by the potential of the remainder of the Essakan claims, which cover an area of 1,433 sq. km along a greenstone belt in northeastern Burkina Faso. The Birimian volcano-sedimentary sequence of rocks within the belt are overlain by clastic sediments of the Tarkwaian Group similar to the Ashanti belt in Ghana, which has produced several million ounces of gold.
As well, the Ottawa-based junior is spending $1.5 million to drill about 6,000 metres on four advanced targets outside its Essakan property, including the Bondi, Golden Hill, Bombore, and Sega projects. Recent drilling on a 2.5-kilometre zone of quartz vein stockwork and intense alteration at the Sega project identified several gold-bearing lenses with average widths of 10 metres and strike lengths from 400 to 700 metres. Orezone is earning a 100% interest in Sega from Repadre Capital, which is in the process of merging with
— The author is a Toronto-based freelance writer specializing in mining and the environment.
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