DR KERIM SENER, MD and founder of Ariana Resources, tells ARTHUR TASSELL that there is a clear pathway for the project to be developed into a 75 000 to 100 000 ounces a year, open-pit operation with a mine life of between 10 and 15 years. He says the company will launch a full feasibility study on the project within the coming months.
Dokwe entered the Ariana Resources (Ariana) stable earlier this year after the company, whose shares are quoted on London’s AIM, concluded an all-share merger with Rockover Holdings (Rockover), the junior explorer responsible for discovering the deposit in 2002.
Ariana, founded over 20 years ago, has focused since its inception on Türkiye (Turkey) and currently produces up to 28 000 ounces per annum (28 kozpa) of gold from its Turkish operations (of which it owns 23.5%), which are on the point of being expanded with a second mine under construction.
“It might seem strange that we have chosen to diversify geographically into Zimbabwe given that it is a long way from Türkiye but there is a story behind this move,” says Sener, who is an exploration geologist with 25 years of experience.
“I started my career in Zimbabwe working for Independence Gold, a Lonmin subsidiary, and I worked at both the How and Shamva gold mines. So, in a sense, the deal with Rockover actually sees me coming full circle.”
Sener, who was born in Türkiye but mainly brought up in the UK, graduated from the University of Southampton with a first-class BSc (Hons) degree in Geology in 1997. He followed up with an MSc in Mineral Exploration from the Royal School of Mines, Imperial College, in 1998. After working in Zimbabwe, he completed a PhD at the University of Western Australia in 2004. “The original subject of my PhD was the gold deposits of the Harare greenstone belt, as I was being sponsored by Independence Gold,” he recalls.
“I worked on this for several months before switching to the gold deposits of Australia’s Northern Territory. The reason for the switch was that Zimbabwe’s economy took a particular turn for the worse at this time, which meant that my company sponsorship disappeared overnight.”
Relating the history of Dokwe, which is located 110 km west-north-west of Bulawayo on communal land in the Tsholotsho District, Sener says it was discovered by Rockover under thick – up to 40 m – Karoo and Kalahari cover utilising some innovative soil geochemical exploration methods in an area with no previous history of gold mining, either formal or artisanal.
“There are several gold mines that are relatively close to Bulawayo such as Bilboes, Turk and How but these are north, north-east and south-east of the city and some considerable way from Dokwe,” says Sener.
“It ranks as a true greenfields discovery in an area which was neglected by explorers until Rockover acquired the ground in the early 2000s. It is a greenstone-hosted deposit and can be seen as a link between the Maitengwe greenstone belt on the border of Botswana and the Bulawayo-Bubi greenstone belt to the east.”
Nick Graham, the geologist who made the discovery and who founded Rockover, has around 50 years of experience in mineral exploration and mine development, mostly in Zimbabwe. He is credited with pioneering heap leaching in the country and (while working with mining entrepreneur Algy Cluff) discovered and developed the Freda Rebecca mine, one of Zimbabwe’s biggest gold mines.
He co-founded Reunion Mining, discovered the Maligreen gold deposit and developed the Sanyati copper mine in Zimbabwe and the Dunrobin gold mine in Zambia. While at Reunion he led the team that addressed the metallurgical issues with the Skorpion zinc deposit in Namibia, which the company had acquired from Anglo American. Reunion then sold the project back to Anglo at – by all accounts – a handsome profit.
Graham and his long-time colleague Andrew du Toit, who has 30 years of experience in the Zimbabwean mining industry, continue to be associated with Dokwe. Graham is now a Non- Executive Director of Ariana while du Toit has been appointed as Operations Director. Sener first met both men around 25 years ago. A new era for Zimbabwean mining
Given the economic turmoil that characterised Zimbabwe in the years after the discovery, Dokwe had to be funded privately but steady progress on the project was nevertheless made. Since 2004 it has undergone ten phases of drilling totalling 42 000 m, three iterations of the Mineral Resource Estimate (MRE) and several geotechnical studies.
Rockover’s work resulted in the delineation of an overall resource of 1.3 Moz, with 1.21 Moz (to the JORC 2012 standard) of this total contained in the Dokwe North area of the project and the balance (to the now non-compliant JORC 2004 standard) in Dokwe Central. Dokwe North is a large low-grade deposit with very few quartz veins – but punctuated by high-grade zones including visible gold – while Dokwe Central is a smaller, higher-grade, pipe-like deposit with abundant quartz veins containing several long high-grade zones. The deposits are 2 km apart.
In March 2022, an independent Pre-Feasibility Study (PFS) for Dokwe North was completed by Minxcon of South Africa. The PFS envisaged Dokwe being developed as an open-pit mining operation producing 1.5 Mt of ore per annum from a single four-stage pit, with the ore being treated in a standard Carbon in Leach (CIL) plant to produce approximately 60 kozpa of gold. “The results of the PFS were strong enough to make the project attractive to us and I personally visited the Dokwe site in July last year after signing an exclusivity agreement with Rockover,” says Sener.
“At the same time, I was able to catch up on events in Zimbabwe. I wanted to satisfy myself that the country, after all the upheavals of the past that had severely impacted the mining industry in particular, is now a welcoming mining jurisdiction. I was greatly heartened by what I saw and heard and I’m confident that Ariana can have a long-term future in the country.
He adds that while Zimbabwe still has its challenges with issues such as power, companies such as Caledonia, which owns the Blanket mine near Gwanda, have shown that it is perfectly possible to operate successfully and profitably in the country. In the second half of last year, Ariana launched an extensive in-country due diligence of the project, an exercise which was completed earlier this year. A conditional acquisition agreement with Rockover was concluded in April and the merger was successfully completed in June this year.
Ariana’s due diligence work has been very comprehensive and has included the re-organisation and re-formatting of all historic databases; the relogging and portable X-ray Fluorescence (pXRF) analysis of 21 662 m of drill core to provide representative multi-element geochemistry of lithologies; and the completion of 1 222 m of diamond drilling split equally between Dokwe North and Dokwe Central. In addition, it conducted a full review of historic resources and the estimation methods employed.
An interesting aspect of the geological work is that Ariana has set up a lowcost and relatively mobile detectORE™ laboratory on site. detectORE™ is an innovative award-winning Australian technology that – when used in conjunction with a handheld pXRF instrument – can help detect very low levels of gold, simply and rapidly. Its use at Dokwe on the historic drill core is a ‘first’ for Zimbabwe. “This is a real game-changing technology which is much cheaper and faster than conventional analytical methods and we are so impressed by it that we are rolling it out at our operations in Türkiye,” says Sener. “Our experience is that the results of detectORE™ correlate very closely with conventional fire-assay results.”
Based on its review of the geological data, Ariana has been able to issue a revised JORC 2012 MRE which increases the previous resource figure by 40%. The project now has a total Measured, Indicated and Inferred resource of 55.9 Mt at 1.02 g/t Au for 1.83 Moz of gold, with 73% being in the Measured and Indicated categories. A significant part of the uplift is due to the update of Dokwe Central in compliance with JORC 2012.
Based on the new MRE and a base case gold price of US$2 000/oz, the company has also revised the original PFS which assumed a base case gold price of US$1 650. The revised study contemplates an open-pit operation – with a strip ratio of 5 to 1 – producing around 60 kozpa of gold from a single staged pit over a mine life of approximately 13 years at an All-in Sustaining Cost (AISC) of US$1 144 per ounce. Processing would be primarily via a CIL plant with flotation possibly being introduced later in the mine life.
The project delivers a post-tax NPV10 of US$160 million and an IRR of 41%, which are substantially above the figures from the original PFS. The peak capital funding requirement is estimated at US$82 million and the payback period at 2.7 years from the start of production. Ariana has followed up this updated PFS with pit optimisation work run at a gold price of US$2 000 per ounce. Measured and Indicated in-pit resources now total 29.6 Mt at 1.33 g/t Au for 1.2 Moz of gold.
Reserves currently stand at 0.8 Moz but these figures indicate a potential to increase this to at least a million ounces. “This latest work suggests that the metrics produced by the revised PFS are very much on the conservative side,” comments Sener.
“We are now exploring the opportunity to take production to 75 to 100 kozpa over a mine life that could be up to 15 years. Strategically, we are considering the development of the project in two stages, with Dokwe Central potentially being mined in the early years and Dokwe North taking over in future years.”
He points out that Ariana sees considerable exploration upside at Dokwe as existing drilling has identified areas worthy of follow-up at both Dokwe North and Central. “In addition, several as yet untested gold anomalies remain to be drilled and extensions of known structures further explored. There is every chance that the resource can grow and, indeed, grow quite considerably,” he states.
Discussing the path to an eventual investment decision, Sener says that the next step will be a further revision of the PFS as an interim step ahead of commencing a Definitive Feasibility Study (DFS). In parallel, Ariana will work on an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) before moving on to permitting and financing. The company is also planning an ASX listing to complement its London listing.
“We envisage completing the DFS in 18 to 24 months,” he says. “If that’s positive and we green light the project, then – based on our Turkish experience – we would anticipate a two-year build time. We have a very busy work programme ahead and are looking forward to taking what we believe is the biggest undeveloped gold deposit in Zimbabwe into production.”
Contact Us
VUKA is the trusted media partner to key professionals, policy makers, suppliers and
manufacturers. We provide unparalleled opportunities for industry-wide connection.
