East African gold producer, Shanta Gold (AIM: SHG), has extended the mine life of its New Luika gold mine in Tanzania to 2025 after fresh drilling, estimation and modelling has identified latent opportunity within the existing operation.
Drilling conducted in April and May, and subsequent modelling and estimation – validated using Micromine’s exploration and mine design solution – resulted in an extra 58 553 ounces of new inferred resources, grading 4.79 grams per tonne, being added to the mine’s mineral resource estimation.
The new high-grade indicated resources will be supplemented with medium or low-grade ounces to match the historically blended feed grade of 4.3 grams per tonne at New Luika.
Originally pegged with an overall reserve based generating an estimated mine life of 2.5 years in 2012, this estimation has grown incrementally over the past seven years.
Robust analysis and modelling using solutions, such as Micromine software, have continued to highlight a long-life potential of the high-margin mine.
Micromine’s mine exploration and design solution was used to interrogate and validate the latest round of drilling to establish the revised mine life estimation and also run an independent validation process for each core data log sheet.
Where there are queries, a report file is created, exported to excel and sent to the personnel responsible for data capturing to correct on the original data.
Once data confirmation is received, all databases are refreshed, and the validation process repeated in Micromine with the use of form sets until all data is validated.
Geostatistics were also undertaken using Micromine to determine estimation parameters.
To learn more about how Micromine can support and enhance your mining exploration efforts, see the Micromine product page.
The Shanta Gold announcement regarding New Luika can be read online.
