Greatland Gold – 24th October
Havieron Update
Shaun Day, MD, Greatland Gold Joins Liam to discuss the RNS (dated 24th October 23) https://polaris.brighterir.com/public/greatland_gold/news/rns/story/w6m507x Greatland Gold plc (AIM:GGP)
The video and transcript are below.
00:00:06 Liam
It’s the 24th of October, 2023, and you’re watching Aim On Air, where specialised and connecting
companies with shareholders is what we do best.
00:00:22 Liam
Hello, and welcome back to Aim On Air. My name is Liam, and today I’m pleased to be hosting the
Managing Director, Sean Day, from Greatland. Welcome to the show, Sean.
00:00:30 Shaun Day
Hi, Liam. I appreciate you having me on the programme again.
00:00:34 Liam
Not a problem at all. Greatland this morning have announced an operation update for Havieron.
There’s only 770 metres of the decline remaining of the 2 ,800 metres. And you’ve mentioned
the lower confined aquifer. What does this mean, please?
00:00:46 Shaun Day
Yeah, thanks Liam. So look, we’ve progressed over 2 ,000 metres down the decline, so more than
two kilometres, which is a really important milestone. That’s chainage length, and there’s
about 770 metres to go to the top of the ore body. As we’ve gone through that, there’s three aquifers
to work through. That upper aquifer, which we’ve successfully gone through, the middle aquifer,
which we’ve successfully gone through. And now we’re coming up to the lower contained aquifer.
And when we say lower contained aquifer, it’s just basically a contained body of water. It doesn’t
flow forever. And this is just for people to understand, this is not a body of water. It’s just
an area where the rocks are more porous. So you get more water generation as you mine through
these areas. And then really what we’re trying to do as we come into these aquifers, is we’re
trying to dry out the ground in two ways. Firstly, we want to depressurise them so that there’s
no water under pressure entering the decline.
00:01:55 Shaun Day
And then secondly, just more dewater. So it’s a drier mining environment to work through, which
is more efficient and more productive. So what we’ve done in each of these three aquifers is
we’ve depressurised them and then dewatered them. and in turn now we’re up to that lower contained
aquifer. We’re depressurising now and also pumping some water to surface as part of that dewatering
process. Okay, so there should be a slight slowdown in the metres for a short period and then
as they get through that they will expand again to speed up as they have been recently. You know,
maybe just to give more clarity around that, we’re going to pause the metres at some point, we’re
going to continue to advance, get down to the position where we think is a safe distance off,
we’re going to pivot to working up the ventilation, which needs to be done in parallel in any
case. And then at some point, once we feel that we’ve sufficiently de -watered that low -contained
aquifer, and then we’re going to kind of drive into that. And that’s really… There is a little
bit more water than we originally anticipated, or at least more water coming to surface process
that needs to be dealt with. And that’s really just we need to calibrate for that. And this is
around safety and cost and productivity.
00:03:21 Liam
That makes sense. Thank you. You’ve also announced there’ll be a further delay with the feasibility
study with completion in September quarter of 2024, which on initial reading, I was a little
disappointed. But in your notes, I read that you see this as a positive step for the Javier on
operation, don’t you?
00:03:39 Speaker 3
Yeah, correct. Look, this is again just keeping it calibrated with kind of getting down towards
the bottom of that ore body, having it reflect that de -risking work that’s being done around
de -watering and de -pressuring the lower contained aquifer and also developing through that.
It allows us to bring in that enhancement and optimisation work and importantly we’re also
working to update that mineral resource estimate. So that’s basically increased the resources
and we want all of that to be reflected. In addition, we have the opportunity for Newmont to be
joining the joint venture. Now this allows their input as the world’s largest gold miner and
also just a whole new set of eyes into the project. So we think that’s really advantageous in
terms of demonstrating and articulating the full potential of the Hafron project.
00:04:42 Liam
Okay, thank you. With the feasibility study moving back from the June quarter to September
quarter, does this have any effect on first ore at all?
00:04:54 Shaun Day
Thanks Liam. So what we’ve been talking about with the market today is hitting that or reaching
that top of the ore body towards the end of the June quarter And I think what we’re effectively
saying, together with that feasibility study, is that’s moving back to the September quarter.
So that’s kind of where we’re updating with respect to the feasibility study. I think it’s hard
for us to be deterministic with respect to the progress of that decline because we want to complete
that dewatering, but that’s how we currently view it. So, effectively, look, it’s pushing
things back a quarter, so be it, but I think in the overall scheme of things, I think where we’re
still really positive about this is the whole project’s been really expedited. Remember,
this was a discovery in 2019, we started the decline in February 2021, so effectively we’re
still really years ahead of the ordinary development schedule, albeit we’ve had to recalibrate
another quarter. That’s fair enough, thank you very much.
00:06:08 Liam
Shaun Day, Managing Director of Greatland Gold, thank you for joining me today.
00:06:12 Shaun Day
Thanks very much Liam, I really appreciate the time again.
00:06:15 Liam
Until next time, my name’s Liam and you’ve been watching M1Air, where specialising and connecting
companies with its shareholders is what we do best.