News

June 10, 2009

West Wits Mining Closes In On Open-Cut Gold Production, And Is Now Turning Its Attention To Sizeable Targets Underground

By Alastair Ford

West Wits Mining put out a nice announcement on 29th May, to the effect that the resource at its Emerald gold deposit on South Africa’s prolific Witwatersrand Basin now totals 95,600 JORC-standard ounces in the measured category. A further 7,400 ounces in the indicated category puts the reported numbers on the deposit at over 100,000 ounces, and you can add a further 20 per cent to take it to a total of 124,000 ounces if you’re prepared to add in a bit of old data. This is all to the good. It may be small, but it’s a start, and it’s exactly the type of result that West Wits chief Grant Ferguson had been expecting. West Wits boasts approximately 300,000 other ounces across the Radiant and Marquise deposits, so the resource base is beginning to look meaningful. “As a company we’re excited about where we’ve got to so quickly”, says Grant, referring to the fact that West Wits’s listing on the Australian stock exchange is less than two years old.

“Our business philosophy from day one”, he continues, “was to look for the low-hanging fruit to generate cash flow, then go to shallow underground levels, like our next door neighbour Central Rand Gold has done”. That business philosophy is still in place, as the latest announcements show. Low-hanging fruit in the context of West Wits’s mining leases essentially means shallow oxide mineralization down to a depth of 85 metres. It’s this type of mineralization that the company is reporting on at...