Gramalote was placed on maintain in August, as preliminary outcomes from an optimized feasibility examine urged the undertaking didn’t meet the JV’s funding thresholds for mine improvement.
Vancouver-based B2Gold stated that now, with the feasibility examine accomplished, it was clear that divesting Gramalote was the best choice for each corporations.
Gramalote was B2Gold’s first undertaking when it was an exploration firm beginning out. In 2015, it acquired the first environmental license awarded in Colombia in 35 years.
The allow gave it three years to work via social facets associated to the open pit undertaking, together with relocating artisanal miners and a few close by residents.
Throughout that point, Gramalote grew to become the centre of a mining rights dispute with Canada’s Zonte Metals, which stays energetic.
The undertaking, B2Gold highlighted, continues to depend on the assist of the federal government in addition to from native communities.
Eyes on Quebradona
AngloGold Ashanti’s chief govt Alberto Calderón, who assumed the highest job in September 2021, just lately stated that promoting the gold undertaking was the corporate’s most popular possibility. He added the transfer would enable AngloGold to give attention to larger property, together with its $1.4 billion Quebradona gold-copper undertaking, additionally in Colombia.
In Could, the nation’s environmental regulator, ANLA, refused to reopen the miner’s software to the environmental licence for the asset. It cited lack of know-how on the undertaking’s space of affect as the primary motive for the refusal.
AngloGold, nevertheless, has stated it plans to resubmit its environmental allow software for Quebradona in 2023.
The mine is anticipated to be Colombia’s largest copper improvement, with manufacturing estimated at 137 million kilos copper focus yearly over a 22-year section one mine life.
AngloGold has been shifting focus from the house nation to extra worthwhile mines in Ghana, Australia and Latin America because the business in South Africa dwindles amid energy cuts, hovering prices and the geological challenges of exploiting the world’s deepest deposits.
