Golden Shield Resources Inc CEO Hilbert Shields has always liked the Marudi Mountain project in Guyana, even as other resource companies sat on the property throughout the years.
Why was Marudi Mountain overlooked? Was it the geology - thought to be a banded iron formation but in fact something much less complex? Was it its location in the southern part of the country, away from the major mining activity in the north? Or was it Guyana itself that wasn’t fully understood as a mining jurisdiction?
All of these factors may have contributed, but Shields, a veteran in gold mining and exploration with experience building a mine, felt the project could be something special. For starters, Marudi already has a historical, Non-43 101-compliant resource estimate of 269,000 ounces of gold grading 1.9 grams per ton (g/t) indicated and another 87,000 ounces at 1.6 g/t inferred on a tiny area of the property known as Mazoa Hill. Given that 95% of the 5,457-hectare property is unexplored, that’s a lot of upside.
So Shields put a team together and Golden Shield Resources was born. The newly-listed group is dedicated to advancing Marudi Mountain into a company-making asset, while introducing investors to the resource potential that Guyana holds.
“The project was never subjected to the systematic, consistent type of exploration that I ran for Golden Star at the Omai project, which became a mine,” Shields explained. “There are a lot of known targets and showings that have not been advanced.”
Shields told Proactive that he and his team have done “more work on the project in the last few months than others have done in the last few years.”
For 2022, that work includes diamond drilling high priority targets and defining new targets in preparation for an updated resource estimate on Mazoa Hill, expected around mid-year.
“With the grey hair on my head, I don’t intend to hang around projects, I intend to advance them fairly quickly,” Shields laughed.
Responsible mining at Marudi Mountain
Importantly, the Marudi Mountain Claim Block was reverted from a mining license to a prospecting license, which allows it to be properly explored. In the past, local, small-scale miners had worked on Marudi without oversight, bringing with them some, let’s say, unsavoury elements like drug and sex trafficking, which caused issues with neighbouring communities.
Now that Marudi is in the hands of Golden Shield, the company can supervise any exploration activity occurring at site while trying to shepherd best practices for artisanal miners in the area, who can continue their work thanks to a separate, special mining permit that allocates 1,012 acres of land within the concession to artisanal miners for a five-year period. Artisanal miners will be limited to a depth of 160 feet and cannot actively mine below an elevation of 376 metres above sea level. Meanwhile, Golden Shield’s prospecting license is valid for three years, with two year-long renewals, effective December 2, 2021.
Marudi Mountain isn’t the only property in Golden Shield’s portfolio. The company also has claims in the heart of Guyana’s mining district in the northern part of the country at Arakaka and Fish Creek, which consist of nearly 18,000 hectares and 6,000 hectares of ground, respectively. Golden Shield is planning on sinking drill holes at both projects this year.
Guyana's mineral potential in focus
With a busy year to come, Golden Shield is hoping to put out results that catch the market’s attention and help to put Guyana’s mineral potential firmly in focus. Guyana sits on the northeastern tip of South America, tucked in between Venezuela, Brazil and Suriname.
Known as “El Dorado” thanks to its significant gold reserves, the country sits on the Guyana Shield, which shares continuity with the famed gold districts of West Africa. The Guyana Shield currently hosts around 110 million ounces of gold, while the geologically similar West African Shield is known to host more than 275 million ounces.
Some big names are operating in the country, albeit through strategic alliances with juniors: Barrick, for example, with its Makapa exploration project, a joint venture with Australia’s Troy Resources, and China’s Zijin Mining, which recently inked a $323 million deal to acquire Guyana Goldfields.
That said, the Caribbean country is relatively underexplored compared to its counterpart on the other side of the globe. But that’s starting to change: the country is in the midst of rapid economic growth, with its GDP (gross domestic product) at nearly 31% in 2020 and predicted to increase over the next decade thanks to a recent oil discovery; and nearly US$30 billion in committed infrastructure investments.
Guyana is still behind West Africa in terms of infrastructure development, and the country is largely covered in virgin rainforest. But the main reason why there has not been more gold discovery in the English-speaking country is that no one has spent the money yet, Shields explained.
“If you take the endowment of greenstone belt rocks, and you divide them by the amount of money that's been spent for exploration – and this is not a guarantee of success, but statistically, you will have so much by way of discovery. If you use those numbers, and you put the same money that's been spent on the West African shield, a more mature shield, we should be producing somewhere about four million ounces of gold a year in Guyana, and we're not doing that. So that's where the opportunity lies," the Golden Shield CEO said.
The right team
If anyone can help to make those discoveries, it’s the Golden Shield team. Shields himself is a dual Canadian and Guyanese national who helped draft the country’s national mining development strategy and was a vice president at the Guyana Gold & Diamond Miners Association.
Also essential to the team is Colin Porter, the vice president for exploration, who holds a PhD in geology and has worked extensively in the West African shield. Co-founder Rory Harding, also a Guyanese citizen, represents a number of multinational companies in the Caribbean, and Leo Hathaway is a geologist who is also part of the executive team of several resource juniors.
Shields tells his shareholders that his philosophy is not to overpromise – this is exploration, after all. But he sees the pathway towards development.
“As long as the journey makes sense for all the stakeholders – those being the investors that put money in the company and the host community in which we operate, and the government that oversees what we do and make sure it works for everybody – we can get lucky and find enough goals to be able to build a world-class mine," he concluded.
Contact Angela at angela@proactiveinvestors.com
Follow her on Twitter @AHarmantas