Sydney, Nov 24, 2005 AEST (ABN Newswire) - Pan Australian Resources Limited (ASX: PNA) on Wednesday said it had completed its first shipment of gold from its Phu Bia Gold Mine.
Managing Director Gary Stafford said the heap leach mine had ramped up to its design ore mining and processing rate of 1.5 million tonnes per annum and had already built a stockpile inventory of 260,000 tonnes of ore grading 1.6 g/t and containing over 12,000 ounces of recoverable gold.
"The mine has the capacity to produce over the name plate design of 60,000 ounces of gold per annum and early signs are that we are going to be able to ramp-up gold production to the design rate over the next several months," he said. "I believe that we should be able to produce 60,000 ounces of gold in 2006 calendar year at cash costs of around US$200 per ounce, which will give us an extremely healthy margin over the prevailing gold price of plus US$490 per ounce."
Mr. Stafford said the company's exploration program was very aggressive, with encouraging initial drilling results at the Phu He Gold-Silver Prospect near Phonsavan in the north of the Contract Area. "We are keen to expand our gold business and increase our ore reserves and therefore the initial results from Phu He are exciting. At the Phu He Prospect we have intersected very high gold and silver grades including 10 metres at 14.6 g/t gold and 198 g/t silver from a depth of only 52 metres," he said "These results are consistent with earlier channel sampling by Pan Australian and previous drilling by the Normandy-Anglo joint venture."
Phu He is a high-grade epithermal vein system which shares similar geological characteristics to the Chatree Gold Deposit in Thailand. Pan Australian yesterday also announced that it had awarded a mandate to ANZ Investment Bank to arrange the debt financing for the Phu Kham Copper-Gold Project a development that could produce 50,000 tonnes of copper and 50,000 ounces of gold per annum from late 2007. A development decision is pending completion of optimisation work on a feasibility study on the Phu Kham Project in March 2006.
Contact
Gary Stafford
TEL: +61 7 3878 9299
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