MINING WELCOME 欢迎采矿 - The ASIA Miner

Indonesia
New alliance covers manganese tenements
WESTERN Manganese has joined forces with
Borneo Brothers Limited (BBL) to advance a
number of manganese prospects throughout
Indonesia. The companies have established
an investment agreement and also signed an
Option Sale and Purchase Agreement for the
option to buy 51% of the issued shares of PT
Genesis Berkat Utama, a manganese concession
with an IUP production licence in Toli
Toli, Central Sulawesi.
The alliance provides Australian-based Western
Manganese with first right of refusal to Indonesia-based
BBL’s pipeline of manganese
concessions for the next two years. There are
six projects in the pipeline located in Nusa
Tenggara Timor, Central Sulawesi and Halmahera,
with total area of 9233 hectares.
BBL is an investment company that specializes
in resources exploration and the early
stages of mining investments in Indonesia. The
company recently exited its substantial investment
in an Indonesian thermal coal concession
through a sale to a multi-national Asian publicly
traded conglomerate, after doing detailed exploration
work on the concession and having
a JORC reserves estimate of plus-60 million
tons and resources estimate of plus-100 million
tonnes completed.
BBL’s well-established Jakarta-based team
is highly engaged in the Indonesian resource
Artisinal miners at a Western Manganese prospect in West Timor. The company aims to be the first company to delineate
a JORC-compliant resource in West Timor.
and financial communities. It includes managing
director Chris Clower, who has extensive
experience in the Indonesia resources
sector and was formerly head of South East
Asia Corporate Finance at Merrill Lynch Investment
Banking Division. From 2005 to
2009 he raised more than US$2 billion for resource
companies operating in Indonesia.
Western Manganese’s primary focus is to
identify and secure quality manganese projects
throughout Indonesia. It currently holds
the rights to two manganese tenements near
Atambua in West Timor, an area regarded as
an emerging manganese province.
Western Manganese paid Aus$100,000 in
cash upon signing the Heads of Agreement
with 2 million fully paid shares and 5 million
options issued to BBL upon the transfer of
the option to acquire 51% of the issued
shares of Genesis. The Genesis concession
is in Dondo Subdistrict and Bualan Subdistrict,
Kabupaten Toli Toli, Central Sulawesi. A
number of manganese boulders have been
found in the production licence area. Should
the Genesis licence hold economic manganese
mineralization, there are two potential
jetty sites within 25km of the concession.
Five rock chip samples were submitted to Intertek
Laboratory and results range from 41.4%
to 55.3% manganese. Genesis has conducted
a geomagnetic survey over 490 hectares of the
licence area with a number of anomalies identified
which require follow up work.
Horas estimate adds to Martabe resources
RESULTS from 41 diamond drill holes at G-
Resources’ Horas deposit have led to an initial
JORC-compliant resource estimate of
400,000 ounces of gold at an average grade
of 0.8 grams/tonne and 880,000 ounces of silver
at 1.7 grams/tonne. It’s the last of three
2011 resource estimates aimed at defining the
Purnama Timur, Tor Uluala and Horas deposits
at the Martabe project in North Sumatra.
The Martabe licence area covers 1639sqkm
with a resource base to date of 7.86 million
ounces of gold and 73.48 million ounces of silver.
G-Resources acquired the gold and silver
mine in July 2009 as its core starter asset,
around which it hopes to build a globally competitive
Asia-Pacific focused gold company.
A team of 15 geologists and five helicopter
supported diamond drill rigs are engaged in
drilling programs across the projects, with staff
working to generate and test exploration targets
for both epithermal gold/silver and porphyry
copper/gold mineralization.
Gold-silver mineralization at Martabe comprises
a higher grade core with intense silicification
and a lower grade halo with lower
silicification and strong clay alteration. The
Horas deposit outcrops at the surface and dips
to the west with a strike length of about 600
metres and a known depth to 250 metres. The
high grade Horas Barat prospect to the west
may represent a higher grade feeder zone or a
parallel but separate gold-silver system.
Preliminary metallurgical analysis was
conducted by comparing the ratio of
cyanide soluble gold assay to gold by fire
assay. G-Resources says the work indicates
that the deposit is likely to be refractory in
nature because it is largely composed of
primary mineralization style. Initial test work
has indicated that recoveries of about 80%
have been obtained on mineralization from
Purnama deposit.
Construction of the Martabe mine is under
way and G-Resources aims to start production
at its Purnama Timur deposit in early
2012 at an annual rate of 250,000 ounces of
gold and 2-3 million ounces of silver.
The company is hoping to increase production
to more than one million ounces of
gold annually by exploring the licence area
and acquiring other quality gold assets.
42 | ASIA Miner | January/February 2012