News

February 10, 2009

Resolute Mining Can Now See The Light At The End Of The Tunnel On The Syama Gold Mine In Mali

By Our Man in Oz

It’s been a hard grind in more ways than one for the team at Australian-based Resolute Mining. But some time in the next few weeks the team ought to be cracking the bubbly. The primary reason for champagne will be to celebrate success at the troublesome Syama gold mine in the central African country of Mali. A secondary reason will be that Resolute has found a way through the financial logjam which has bedevilled world financial markets for the past year. “It has been a bit of a heavy lift,” says Resolute’s persistent chief executive, Peter Sullivan, describing the company’s third attempt to master the challenge that has been Syama. Fooled before him were BHP Billiton and Randgold Resources. Both of these earlier owners were unable to crack the code to unlock the mine’s tricky metallurgy.

Using the knowledge and experience accumulated by the two previous owners, Resolute’s plan has been to bypass a full roast of Syama’s ore, switching instead to the production of a gold-rich concentrate. Both BHP Billiton and Randgold stumbled at the expensive roasting step, which they tried at a time when the gold price was a fraction of today’s US$900 an ounce. But, offsetting Resolute’s advantage of being able to study earlier mistakes, has been the problem of re-developing a mine in the...