Cora Gold (CORA.L) has released an updated resource estimate on its flagship Sanankoro gold project in Mali last month. The updated resource included the data obtained from a 7,000 meter RC drill program and about 900 meters of air core drilling.
The updated resource now contains 657,000 ounces of gold in the indicated resource category with an additional 263,000 ounces in the inferred resource category. On a combined basis, the total resource now stands at 920,000 ounces of gold at an average grade of 1.15 g/t gold. And as you can see below, if we would ignore all the non-oxide ounces, the Sanankoro resource still contains approximately 680,000 ounces of gold hosted in oxide material. And in excess of half a million of these ounces have an average grade of 1.23 g/t. As a reminder, the scoping study was based on a total recovery of just 138,000 ounces of gold from the 198,000 ounces that made it into the mine plan. Needless to say the feasibility study should be better.
Unfortunately the company’s share price has lost about 70% of its value in just over a year when an ultra high-grade interval of 19 meters containing 1 ounce of gold per tonne of rock sent the share price sky high. Cora plans to release the definitive feasibility study on Sanankoro in the current quarter and hopefully this will drum up some renewed interest as the expanded resource should underpin a larger mining operation. An additional reason for the weak share price performance likely is the definitive retreat of the French army from Mali which increases the security concerns.
Disclosure: The author has no position in Cora Gold. Please read our disclaimer.
