East Africa Metals has submitted the mine permitting application to the Ministry of Mines, Petroleum, and Natural Gas for the Terakimti Oxide gold project at its 70%-owned Harvest Project in the Tigray region of Ethiopia.
The Harvest joint venture has already approved final draft documents.
Go deeper with GlobalData
The company expects that the review by the ministry will result in a recommendation to the licensing commission for approval of the license.
Terakimti Oxide gold project has a mineral resource amount of 1,125,000t, and heap leach recoveries of 75.3% gold and 39.7% silver.
The deposit is proposed as an open pit mining operation and later heap leaching, as well as on-site processing to produce gold-silver dore.
Terakimti is located in the Tigray Region of Northern Ethiopia, around 600km north of the Addis Ababa.
The existing transportation and power infrastructure located close to the project site will improve the development potential of the operation.
East Africa said that the proposed mining operation will use grid power for the project, which is located close to the high tension power line.
Beles Engineering already completed an independent environmental impact and socio-economic assessment (EISA) study for the project.
East Africa Metals president and CEO Andrew Lee Smith said: "The resource at Terakimti Project shares a similarity with other copper-gold projects in the region, such as the Bisha and Debarwa deposits, in that the initial mining opportunity was defined by the surface gold-oxide resource followed by mining of copper-gold-zinc sulphide resources."
