Gryphon’s gold is ‘sticking out of the ground’Luke ForrestalIt...

Gryphon’s gold is ‘sticking out of the ground’
Luke Forrestal

It usually takes specific characteristics for a gold project to catch the eye of the industry’s majors: a certain
amount of ounces in resource, at a certain average grade and at not too great a depth below the surface.
Gryphon Minerals’ Banfora development in Burkina Faso is arguably starting to stack up on all these
measures.

Last week the Perth-based company announced a maiden resource of 520,000 ounces for its newly
discovered Samavogo deposit, lifting Banfora’s total inferred resource to 29 million tonnes grading 2.1 grams
of gold per tonne for 2 million ounces of contained gold.
And all of it lies at depths of less than 100 metres.
“There’s not many new discoveries out there with resources of 2 million ounces and grades of over 2 grams
per tonne that are growing as rapidly as Banfora,” Gryphon managing director Steve Parsons told
ResourcesDaily. “It’s all shallow and sticking out of the ground.”
But Parsons is not thinking about selling Banfora to one of the big producers yet; there’s a lot more
exploration to be done.

The company has drilled 330,000 metres at Banfora over the past four years to build the resource to 2 million
ounces.
Over the next 12 months it plans to spend $30 million on 600,000 metres of drilling to grow the project even
further.

“Some of it will be in-fill drilling and won’t be adding ounces to the resource,” Parsons says. “But just by doing
that amount of drilling, we should find a lot more gold.”
Samavogo is the third virgin deposit Gryphon has discovered at Banfora. Nogbele hosts the bulk of the
current resource (1.2 million ounces), while Fourkoura is smaller at 300,000 ounces.

The company has identified 19 other priority targets on its tenements and intends to drill them systematically
over the next 12 months.
By the end of the year, it expects to have announced another resource upgrade to 2.5-3 million ounces.
“That is the number, we need to push the button on a 200,000 ounce a year operation so we’re almost there,”
Parsons says.

The Nogbele deposit is expected to be developed as the first open pit mine at Banfora as well as the site of a
mill capable of treating 2.5 million tonnes of material a year that will cost about $125 million, according to
Deutsche Bank estimates.
Samavogo, Fourkoura and any other deposits that contribute to the resource would then be developed as
satellite pits. Ore from these deposits would be trucked to Nogbele for processing.
If Gryphon is successful in finding enough ounces to consider a substantial increase in production from
200,000 ounces a year, the most likely option to accommodate an expansion would be to duplicate the
Nogbele mill.
“The way we’re looking to design that it will be a 2.5 million tonne per annum operation whereby we can then
attach on another 2.5 million tonne plant,” Parsons says. “We can get up to 5 million tonnes very quickly,
which means you’re doubling your ounces.”
But the company could also look at siting mills elsewhere in the region if any of the satellite deposits turn out
to be big enough.
Toronto-listed gold miner SEMAFO owns deposits a couple of hundred kilometres away from Gryphon in
Burkina Faso that are similar in size and grade, and it is talking about building as many as five plants in its
project area.
Engineering firm Lycopodium is in the process of completing a scoping study on the initial 2.5 million tonne a
year project at Banfora that will give Gryphon a better idea of capital costs. The study is due for completion in
a couple of months.
Gryphon had $61 million in the bank at the end of December and will need to raise more money if it approves
the Banfora development.
The company is yet to decide exactly what funding mix it will go for, but w