Teranga Gold Corporation has announced the results of its preliminary feasibility study for the Sabodala-Massawa Gold Complex, located in Senegal, West Africa. Earlier this year, Teranga completed the acquisition of the Massawa gold project, one of Africa’s highest grade undeveloped open-pit gold projects, from Barrick Gold Corporation.

The PFS focuses on an initial concept to mine the Massawa Project’s deposits leveraging the existing plant at Teranga’s flagship Sabodala Gold Operations. The PFS demonstrates that Sabodala-Massawa is a top-tier mine with a large proven and probable reserve base of 4.8 Moz (75.79 Mt at 1.98 g/t Au at $1,250 gold), with low all-in-sustaining costs (AISC) of $749 per ounce, and net cash flows of over $2.2 billion at $1,600/oz gold over a 16.5-year mine life. In addition, the PFS outlines strong potential for growth through further exploration and discovery.

The processing side of the project is interesting. Mined non-refractory ore will be processed in the existing Sabodala processing plant. Modifications are in progress to increase the capability for overall gold production and increase efficiencies to process the high-grade oxide ore from the Central Zone (CZ). These additions include a gravity recovery circuit for the coarse gold, an additional leach tank to increase residence time, and upgrades to the elution circuits due to the higher gold content in the feed. These upgrades are expected to be installed throughout the first half of 2021 as “Phase 1” of the Sabodala plant upgrades.

For processing the deposits that contain refractory gold ore, a separate ROT plant with a nominal capacity of 1.2 Mt/y will be installed adjacent to the existing Sabodala plant, with processing expected to begin in 2023. The ROT design is based on the use of bacterial oxidation (BIOX® technology) to expose the gold that is occluded within sulphide minerals, which then allows for gold extraction using a standard CIL process. This technology is well proven and is currently operating in multiple plants around the world. Sabodala’s existing plant will be modified to allow primary crushing of the refractory ore feed with the existing crushing circuit, prior to feeding into a separate circuit comprising grinding, flotation to recover sulphides and free gold to a concentrate, regrinding, followed by oxidation of the slurry in two stages of BIOX reactors. The slurry product is then neutralised and processed in a separate carbon-in-leach (CIL) circuit to recover the gold. The company expects to modify its existing tailings storage facility (TSF) and the design of its second permitted TSF to accommodate the processing of refractory ore.

The Massawa Project is comprised of a mine license of 320 km2 and a regional exploration land package of nearly 286 km2. The opportunity for additional resource delineation on the property is well known to Teranga and the previous owner Randgold Resources, which merged with Barrick in 2019. Teranga has drilled more than 27,000 m since March 2020 at Massawa, as part of an ongoing $10-million exploration program. Exploration drilling programs are ongoing at the three initial primary deposits –Sofia, Central Zone (CZ) and North Zone (NZ), with along-trend and internal drilling gaps being evaluated..

Now that a base case technical concept has been established with the PFS, Teranga will continue the technical work in support of a definitive feasibility study,anticipated to be completed in 2021, to further de-risk and increasethe Massawa Project’s value.