west africa gold keeps calling

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/mining-energy/west-africa-gold-keeps-calling/story-e6frg9ex-1226028178194

West Africa gold keeps calling

Robin Bromby From: The Australian March 25, 2011 3:26PM

IT'S a gold rush 21st century style.

It may look different to California or Victoria or New Zealand?s Otago, among the best known gold rushes of the nineteenth century, and it?s being run by corporates rather than by individual prospectors with their worldly goods in a swag, but the excitement and the lure of riches are the same.

Look at the announcements out of North American gold companies, and there is a flood of news about drilling programs throughout the West Africa region.

This week Newmont Mining approved capital spending of between $US700 million and $US1 billion to develop its 7.2m ounce Akyem gold deposit in Ghana.

There is plenty happening with Australia?s explorers, too.

Today we saw Golden West Resources join the race to West Africa with plans to buy the owner of a London-based company holding the Dalafin project in Senegal, another step toward GWR launching an initial public offering for its subsidiary, Western Gold Resources.

West African Resources reported today it had raised $7m at 45c a share. The stock rose 10.5 per cent on the news to 52.5c, contrasting with a low of 39c last Friday. The stock had risen during this week on news of a high-grade discovery in Burkina Faso, WAF?s exploration focus. The money raised will support the company?s plan to drill 200,000m a year.

Vital Metals said drilling at its Doulnia project, also in Burkina Faso, indicated the potential for a large gold system. It said drilling had identified multiple sub-parallel zones of gold mineralisation length of at least 2km.

Continuing with the Burkina Faso story, Deutsche Bank this week put a ?buy? tag on Gryphon Minerals after what it called encouraging drilling results at the Samavogo deposit, which returned 10m at 6.2 grams/tonne gold and 5m at 11.2g/t.

Hartleys has a ?speculative buy? on Papillon Resources across the border in Mali. Its report says recent drilling continued to extend gold mineralisation from multiple prospects and includes a new zone of mineralisation which returned 10m at 2.02 grams/tonne gold.

ENDS

Interesting to see a few of the peers mentioned in this article that where in the last presentation, such as Papillon and Gryphon with enterprise value/resource ounces (A$) at five times the rate of signatures.

http://www.signaturemetals.com.au/pdfs/InvestorPresentation10Mar11.pdf