Emma Priestley is a well-known face in mining circles. She has had successes in the past and rubbed shoulders with some big international hitters while at mining and infrastructure specialist, Lonrho Africa.
What then, made her interested in taking on the challenge of turning around Goldstone Resources LTD (LON:GRL) which, at the time she took charge in February 2016, appeared to be just another moribund African gold company floundering around looking for a purpose?
Priestley came to Goldstone via her association with Stratex International (LON:STI), a company which at one point she was slated to take over herself but politics got in the way and Stratex went in a different, and as it turned out, disastrous direction.
It's all about the asset
Priestley, as Stratex’s appointed director, was left holding the reins at Goldstone. And she’s held them ever since.
“What I liked is the asset,” she says. “I said, let’s clean this project up.”
One of Goldstone’s biggest problems was actually that it had lost the confidence of its investors. And when investors are disillusioned, the quality of any given asset makes little difference.
But Priestley saw this as an opportunity.
With application and hard work, she felt the company’s Ghana portfolio could deliver some serious upside to investors. After all, the two key licences lie in one of the most prolific gold producing areas anywhere in the world, not far from the famous Obuasi gold mine, which has a history of mining dating back more than 100 years, and which in the early part of the last decade was producing upwards of 500,000 ounces a year.
Eight or so kilometres to the north, the old Akrokeri mine on Goldstone’s Akrokeri-Homase license has dates back almost as far. However, because of flooding and problematic labour relations, Akrokeri ceased production back in 1909 and was never brought back to life.
Until now...
Goldstone is now sinking a new shaft at Akrokeri to allow it to access the old underground workings as well as the wider orebody. It’s an enticing proposition: In its day, this mineralisation was responsible for the production of 75,000 ounces of gold at a recovered average grade of 24 grams per tonne.
Whether Goldstone will ever be able to mine at those grades is open to question. But at this stage, that’s not the main idea anyway.
Priestley has been looking at old archives at the British Geological Survey and at Kew, and she’s formed some interesting hypotheses about what might still be down there, underground at Akrokeri.
Because the production run ended so abruptly, the thinking goes, there could be significant unrecovered ore from the old workings. In addition to that enticing prospect, there’s also the possibility that ore that was left in the early days in favour of richer, higher grade rock may itself now be highly economic.
So the plan is to use the new shaft to undertake a full assessment thirty metres down in the old workings, with results expected in the autumn. The shaft has already reached a depth of 20 metres, and an electric winch is now being installed to assist with the extraction of materials.
Meanwhile, other work is underway on the Homase section of the licence. Here an ongoing scoping study is looking to identify areas from which bulk samples can be taken at surface to assess the viability of working along the trend that runs from Akrokeri up to the previously worked Homase open pit.
WATCH: Goldstone Resources welcomes support in Ghana for redevelopment of goldmines
There’s already just over 600,000 ounces of gold delineated below the old Homase pit, but it now seems clear that the trend that connects Homase to Akrokeri could potentially run for more than eight kilometres, and play host to several more open pits.
The idea is to delineate enough oxides to get production going on a small scale and to bring cash flow into Goldstone within two years. Environmental studies are on the way, and the government of Ghana is making very favourable noises about gold mining, and in particular the planned restart of Obuasi just down the road.
So, in two years, Goldstone aims to be permitted and up and running with production from two oxide pits, says Priestley.
None of this will require much cash, as more than 100 years of knowledge and know-how has already been built up around this ground. There’s even the possibility that Goldstone’s early production could be sold as concentrate, mitigating the need for processing equipment.
Either way, in two years, with production and cash flow coming in, Goldstone will be on a footing to investigate thoroughly the full potential of its extensive licences in one of the most prolific gold-producing regions in the world.