Burkina Faso Projects

The Burkina Faso projects are all located within the Birimian gold belts in West Africa. As Figure 1 shows, these belts contain numerous gold discoveries, a number of which are in production. Many areas of active artisanal mining remain only lightly explored. As a result, further exploration driven by continuing investor and mining company interest is likely to produce more gold discoveries in the years to come.

Figure 1: Major West African gold deposits within the Birimian gold belt (green indicates areas of volcanics and sediments and pink indicates areas of granite). Burkina Faso is outlined in black.

Burkina Faso is a landlocked country, bounded to the south by Ghana, Cote D’Ivoire, Togo and Benin, to the west by Mali and to the east by Niger (Figure 1). Gold mining in the past was confined to artisanal mining and one substantial mining operation at Poura in the west of the country which closed in 1999. In the past five years, however, there has been a strong resurgence in exploration and mine development, stimulated especially by the release of new mining regulations in 2003. The Taparko, Mana, Kalsaka, Inata, Essakane and Youga gold mines are now in production. Of these, the largest known deposit is Essakane with 6 million ounces of reported gold in indicated and inferred resources. In addition, recent exploration results announced by Ampella Mining Limited (Batie West), Gryphon Minerals Ltd (Banfora) and Volta Resources Inc (Kiaka) suggest that more gold mines will be developed in future years.

In common with other West African countries, the Government has the right to take a free carried interest of 10% in any ore deposit that is brought into production. Mining royalties are currently 3% of revenue from mineral production although the possibility of raising the royalty to 5% has been mooted by the Government. The rate of corporate tax for mining companies is 20%.

Exploration in Burkina Faso to date has consisted mainly of drilling beneath artisanal workings and soil geochemical anomalies. While country-scale geophysical data has been collected, it has been little used by most explorers. PD’s review of data on various Burkina Faso projects suggests that there is potential for new discoveries beneath the laterite and thin alluvial cover which, along with the application of the understanding of regolith processes developed in Australia, may be unlocked by the Predictore^TM Technology.

Figure 2: PD project location and known ore deposits in Burkina Faso

In Burkina Faso, PD holds rights to explore seven granted exploration permits and holds two exploration permit applications covering a total area of 1,544 square kilometres (Figure 2). 

These areas were selected using PD’s country-scale project generation method. Of the permits, all but one is located in the eastern part of the country (Figure 2). The bulk of the tenement area lies in the Fada N’Gourma greenstone belt, which continues over the border into Niger where it hosts the Samira Hill-Libiri Mine complex operated by Semafo (Figure 3). This area has been labelled Bonsiega and is currently PD’s flagship project.


Figure 3: PD’s tenement position in eastern Burkina Faso with respect to Semafo’s Samira Hill gold mine in Niger superimposed on the government geological interpretation (note: PD’s interpretation is that there are more extensive areas of greenstone rocks in the Tamfoagou and Tyekanyebi permit applications than the geological map suggests).