WITH substantial mineral resources at its two mine sites in Morobe province, Harmony Gold Ltd is ranking itself second only to Lihir Gold Ltd on the list of the leading mining operators in the country.
The general manager for Hidden Valley operation Adam Wright said over the past five years, the company had spent huge sums of money into exploration and all that had paid well with convincing results.
Mr Wright was speaking at a mining seminar underway in Port Moresby.
He said the company prides itself for uncovering significant resources of up to 15 million ounces of gold.
“We are not just about gold … we are about copper, silver and molybdenum as well.
“We take into account these metals and we look at our resource on a gold- equivalent basis that doubles our resource.
“We actually have a resource of 30 million ounces gold equivalent and if we look at how that ranks us with the other players within Papua New Guinea … we rank second,” Mr Wright stressed.
He said what it meant for Harmony was that the company could really raise itself to become a major player with the PNG resource sector in the many years to come.
“We have plans with the Hidden Valley and Wafi operations to mine over four billion ounces of gold and 1.7 billion tonnes of copper together with some silver and a little bit of molybdenum,” Mr Wright said
He added that between the two sites, there was a lot of resources where they could be converted into reserves that would provide an important avenue for the growth of the company in PNG.
“We are still a gold miner and you will see that 50% of the resource value is in gold,” Mr Wright recapped.
He said the Hidden Valley project was under construction at present, which will be an open pit mine producing 300,000 ounces of gold per annum at a mine life for at least 10 years or possibly longer.
The project was scheduled to begin production in early 2009.
The Wafi project will feature both an open pit and underground copper and gold mine.
Mr Wright noted that the Wafi project had just come out of pre-feasibility and was heading into feasibility over the next two years with the anticipation of production in 2012.
The Wafi mine was expected to produce 65,000 tonnes of copper per annum and 110,000 ounces of gold with a mine life expectancy of 13 years.
The company also revealed plans to bring another mine into production on the back of its exploration effort within a 10-year time frame.