Site visit: G2 Goldfields hopes to add to discovery count at Oko project in Guyana

When Dan Noone first visited Guyana in 2004, the capital Georgetown was a “sleepy place,” says the geologist and CEO of G2 Goldfields (TSXV: GTWO). “There weren’t many cars on the road.” 

As recently as 2010, Guyana was ranked the second-poorest nation in the Caribbean, after Haiti. Now, after a string of offshore oil discoveries off Guyana’s coast by Exxon Mobil over the last seven years, Georgetown is a “bustling” city, and the South American country of less than 1 million people is on pace to be the fastest growing economy in the world this year, with expected GDP growth of 48%, according to the International Monetary Fund. 

Guyana’s reputation as a gold miner has also been on the ascent. At the time of Noone’s first visit, he was CEO of Absolut Resources. Four years later he would join Guyana Goldfields — the company that discovered, built and put Guyana’s largest gold mine, Aurora, into production under the leadership of founder and mining entrepreneur Patrick Sheridan — as a director, later becoming VP Exploration in 2010. Guyana Goldfields was bought by China’s Zijin Mining in 2020 for US$238 million. 

Under Noone and Sheridan as executive chairman, G2 Goldfields — the name refers to the second take of Guyana Goldfields — hopes to be even more successful in advancing its high-grade Oko main gold project in the Cuyuni mining district, 60 km west of Bartica. 

The company is off to a promising start at Oko, with an initial resource for the Oko Main deposit released in April this year outlining 793,000 indicated tonnes grading 8.63 grams gold per tonne for 220,000 contained oz. and 3.3 million inferred tonnes grading 9.25 grams gold for 974,000 gold ounces. 

But this time around, G2 isn’t looking to build a mine. Now that Guyana’s gold potential is attracting more interest, Noone says the company won’t likely have to go that far to get an attractive takeover bid. 

“Guyana was a different place 18 years ago. There weren’t really any major companies in there exploring the country, we didn’t have the oil discoveries,” he recalls. “So every time we brought someone down to try and get them to come and buy [Aurora], we had to take them through the whole history and meet the government and hold their hand.” 

Noone says that also applies to the majors — Barrick Gold (TSX: ABX; NYSE: GOLD) and Newmont (TSX: NGT; NYSE: NEM) — who didn’t know much about the country at the time. Barrick is now actively exploring in Guyana, and in neighbouring Suriname Newmont operates the Merian mine, which produced more than 450,000 oz. gold last year. 

“This time around Guyana’s very much a place that the majors want to be. I think it’ll be a lot easier when it comes to exiting or trying to transact with another company on the project. They’ll be a lot more suitors here this time, maybe a lot more competitive.” 

With that in mind, G2 is aiming to make the resource “as big as possible as quickly as possible,” Noone says.  

So far, Oko Main is around 900 metres long, 250 metres wide, and at the time of the resource, at least 350 metres deep. But the G2 team believes the deposit, which starts from surface, will extend much deeper.  

“It’s a classic narrow high-grade reef-style system and we are certain that there will be deeper roots to the discovery,” VP Exploration Boaz Wade told guests during a November site visit to the project. “A big part of our drilling focus will be on that within the next year or so — extending the high-grade shear zones of vein structures that we’ve discovered to certain vertical depths.” 

The company’s looking to double the deposit’s current depth of 350 metres, and is now drilling at depths of more than 450 metres. Gold mineralization at the orogenic deposit is hosted in three main shear zones that are between 1.5 and 14 metres wide, with about 50 metres between shears. 

Wade also noted the team explicitly targeted high-grade ounces in the initial Oko Main resource, which incorporated 98 holes, with the cutoff grade set at 4 grams gold per tonne. 

In mid-November, the company reported deeper holes, with hole OKD-130 cutting 3.8 metres of 70 grams gold per tonne from 442 metres; while hole OKD-126A returned 3 metres of 27.8 grams gold starting from 496 metres depth. (True widths are estimated at 65-85% of reported widths.)  

Oko Main is only the first of many discoveries the company expects to make at Oko, which is located in the Cuyuni greenstone belt and accessible from Georgetown by a combination of boat and truck. Overall, the company holds options on 77.7 sq. km of ground, controlling 17 km of prospective strike length of the prospective 23-km-long Aremu-Oko Trend. Through soil sampling and mapping of historical and current artisanal mining operations, G2 has identified five discrete, multi-kilometre-long zones of gold mineralization. 

In addition to growing Oko Main, G2 plans to follow up on “a multitude” of near-surface targets over the next six to 12 months, Wade says. The team is looking for another high-grade discovery or a combination of a high grade discovery and of a more bulk style system with open pittable economic potential. 

Its prime target is the 1.2-km Ghanie/Shear 1 zone on the property, which lies on the main Oko shear, just south of Oko Main and just north of and along strike of Reunion Gold’s (TSXV: RGD) Oko West deposit next door. When G2 releases an updated resource for Oko Main — expected at the end of the first quarter of 2023 — it also plans to release a first resource for Ghanie.  

While Oko Main (and most of the other targets at the Oko project) host high-grade veins in carbonaceous sediments, the Ghanie zone hosts a magnetite replacement style of mineralization that Noone says is similar to that found at Reunion’s Oko West. 

 Noone describes Ghanie, which saw a 12-hole, 1,356-metre diamond drill program this fall, as a “game changer” for G2. While the zone had seen previous drilling in 2020 and 2021, the company says the holes were collared too far to the west, missing the main shear and drilling the intrusion instead. The company released assays from the first four holes at the end of November, including an “exceptional” intercept of 50 metres grading 1.71 grams gold per tonne from 21 metres down hole in GDD-04. 

“The mineralization is hosted in magnetite-rich metamorphic rocks and is disseminated over wider zones that are tens of metres as opposed to metres, and generally lower grade — 1.5 to 2 grams gold as opposed to over 10 grams gold,” Noone said. 

“The significance of the Ghanie zone is the potential to host broad, near-surface volumes of gold mineralization that can be mined in an open pit. This opens up the scale of operation that can be built and the rate at which ounces can be mined.” 

While Noone says Ghanie is a great second discovery at Oko, he believes there are more to find along the Aremu-Oko Trend. Targets include Oko North, Oko North West, Sands, Aremu Mine, Herod’s Vein and Shepherd’s Vein. 

Historical production and 2019 discovery 

The Guiana Shield which underlies Guyana as well as neighbouring Suriname, French Guiana and parts of Venezuela and Brazil, is highly prospective for gold. But the craton is underexplored because it’s covered by dense tropical forest with limited outcropping rock.  

The Aremu-Oko district saw its first alluvial gold rush in the 1870s. Despite hosting the historic Aremu mine, which yielded close to 6,500 oz. at an average grade of 15.6 grams gold per tonne over a five-year period in the early 20^th century — as well as small-scale mining since then, the Oko property had never been drilled or subjected to a modern exploration program before G2 began work in 2019.  

At Oko there are still some medium-scale miners, who are all operating legally as sub-contractors under agreements with the underlying Guyanese concession holder. G2 has made all option payments to the local licence holder except for one — a $1-million payment it will need to complete within two years in order to transfer the claims to it under a prospecting licence. Under Guyana’s system, that’s the first step to ownership of concessions by a foreign company. Once it acquires a prospecting licence, G2 will have five years to complete a feasibility study. The payment will leave the local vendor with a 2.5% NSR royalty, which G2 can purchase for $4 million.

The November 2019 discovery of Oko Main was aided by mid-scale mining on the concession. 

“We started a soil sampling program that went from Aremu down to Oko over about a six-month period and when we got to October, we realized we needed to get down and drill Oko because we had an option payment due in November,” Noone recalls. The team went to an area of the property just south of the camp where medium-scale miners had an active mine shaft and drilled underneath it. 

“We were drawn to where they were mining. There was some surface geological information in that pit, but it was pretty minimal, so it was fairly hard to figure out exactly what was going on,” he says. 

“The first four holes I think we drilled in different directions just to make sure that we had the right orientation. We weren’t sure that it was going to be a planar body because it could have been a series of shoots — which would have been easier to miss if you’re not drilling in the right direction.” 

Luckily, the very first hole hit with 27 metres of 5.2 grams gold per tonne from 63 metres depth. 

With about $10 million in the treasury, Noone says the company has enough cash to keep the drills turning for another year. G2 has drilled about 35,000 metres to date on the property, with three drill rigs currently at work.  

“There’s definitely a lot of other targets to get on with,” Noone says, adding each has its own “unique nature.”  

In terms of next targets, the company will be investigating Oko North, Bird Cage, Sands, Oko Northwest, Aremu East and Shepherd Vein. 

G2 Goldfields traded at 66¢ at press time in a 52-week range of 38¢ and 83¢. 

The company has 164.7 million shares outstanding for a market capitalization of $110 million.