Modern Mining January 2017

GOLD

who was GM of Tati – are now with Asanko. Asanko Gold is essentially an amalgam of Keegan Resources, a Canadian company which owned Esaase, and Australian junior PMI Gold, which owned Obotan. Breese, Steyn and their co-investors in an investment group known as Highland Park acquired an interest in Keegan in 2012 after investing in the company, with Breese then taking over as CEO. The previous management had completed a PFS which indi- cated a very high capex for Esaase of just over half a billion US dollars but Breese and his col- leagues were confident they could bring this figure down substantially. While Esaase was considered to be viable in its own right, it soon became evident to Breese and his team that combining it with PMI’s Obotan deposit to the south – which had pre- viously being mined in the late 1990s and early 2000s by Resolute Mining – could unlock huge synergies and negotiations with PMI were ini- tiated. The path to a merger was by no means easy but by early 2014 Keegan (by then known as Asanko Gold) had absorbed PMI and the way was open to develop the two properties in tandem. “Our approach is based on staged develop- ment of the assets, with the cash flow from Phase 1 financing the Phase 2 expansion,” explains Truter. “We decided to base Phase 1 on the Nkran deposit since it has a higher grade than Esaase – and was also ahead of Esaase in terms of permitting. Phase 2 will see Esaase being developed and the mine’s gold production

with backgrounds in the Zimbabwean mining industry), who at one stage managed LionOre Mining, whose assets included the now discon- tinued Tati nickel mine near Francistown in Botswana. LionOre was sold to Norilsk in 2007, but many of its executives – including Truter,

Layout of the Phase 1 and 2 projects.

Top projects

This recently commissioned Sandvik mobile crusher has boosted Asanko’s crushing capacity.

48  MODERN MINING  January 2017