Name and Location
New Liberty gold project, Liberia.

Client
Aureus Mining.

Project Description
New Liberty will be Liberia’s first commercial gold mine and Aureus’s first mine in its highly prospective 546 km2 licence area.

The gold deposit, which lies within the Bea Mountain mining licence, has a total proven and probable reserve of 8.5-million tonnes, grading 3.4 g/t gold.

Total resources comprise an estimated 651 000 t, grading 4.77 g/t gold in the measured category; 9.15-million tonnes, grading 3.55 g/t gold in the indicated category; and 5.73-million tonnes, grading 3.2 g/t gold in the inferred category.

The measured and indicated resources are generally located within the first 200 m below surface. The inferred resource remains open at depth.

A feasibility study completed on the project envisioned an openpit mining operation, extracting ore at a nominal rate of 1.1-million tonnes a year. The openpit will comprise two adjacent and interconnecting pits.

The mining schedule expects the operation to produce 8.7-million tonnes of ore, grading 3.3 g/t, with an associated 132-million tonnes of waste and an average life-of-mine stripping ratio of 15:1 over a mine schedule of 8.5 years.

A steady-state mining rate is planned after the initial period of waste prestripping at an annualised plant feed rate of 1.1-million tonnes. The yearly waste mining rate is 22.2-million tonnes for the first five years, followed by 10.6-million tonnes, 5.7-million tonnes and 2-million tonnes respectively each year thereafter. This will result in an average waste mining rate of 16.2-million tonnes over the estimated eight-year mine life.

The waste material will be placed in a dump to the south of the pit for the first four years of production, following which the bulk of the waste material will be backfilled into the Larjor pit. A mining contractor will be used for all earthmoving activities and a conventional truck-and-shovel method will be used for mining operations.

The mining project includes a process plant, offices, workshops, a generator power plant, housing and warehouses, a mining camp, a tailings storage facility (TSF), a rock dump, an explosives bay, various ore stockpiles and a stream diversion, referred to as the Marvoe Creek diversion channel (MCDC).

Value
The initial capital cost of the project is estimated at $136-million, which excludes contingency, but includes the design and development of the processing plant, the mining establishment and prestrip, the general mine infrastructure and power supply, the tailings dam construction, creek diversion and general infrastructure.

Duration
First production is expected in 2015.

Latest Developments
Aureus Mining has completed the pouring of concrete for the ball mill foundations at the processing plant of its New Liberty gold project.

The manufacturing of the mill components were also on schedule and were expected to be completed by the end of March 2014, after which the components would be shipped from South Africa to Liberia, where they were expected to arrive in the first week of June.

The ball mill, which is 5.18 m × 7 m in size, will take between four and six months to erect, with commissioning expected to start in the fourth quarter of this year and be completed in the first quarter of 2015.

Meanwhile, the civil works for the primary crushers, secondary crushers and screens were expected to be completed by the end of March, with steel erection expected to start mid-April. The carbon-in-leach bases are expected to be ready for handover to the structural, mechanical, platework and piping contractor by mid-April, when the steelwork will start. All the equipment being manufactured is on schedule. The project’s bank financing process also remains on track, with the first drawdown scheduled for April.

Key Contracts and Suppliers
Golder Associates Ghana (environmental- and social-impact assessment scoping study, TSF and MCDC design work), DRA Mineral Projects (enginering, procurement and construction management design) and Australian Mining Consultants (43-101 resource classification and openpit and mining optimisation studies).

On Budget and on Time?
Construction of Aureus’s New Liberty gold project remains on track, with first gold expected during the first quarter of 2015.

Contact Details for Project Information
Aureus Mining CEO David Reading, tel +44 20 7257 2930.
Golder Associates Ghana, tel +233 302 978 819/23 or fax +27 11 315 0317.
DRA Mineral Projects, tel +27 11 202 8600.
Australian Mining Consultants, tel +61 3 8601 3300, fax +61 3 8601 3399 or email amcmelb@amcconsultants.com.au.