Peter Spiers – Orbis Gold

ONE OFF THE WOOD: Orbis Gold managing director Peter Spiers found time from a busy schedule at the RIU Melbourne Resources RoundUp to speak with The Roadhouse about the company’s West African adventures.

The name Orbis Gold (ASX:OBS) is one that is unfamiliar to me. Is that because I haven’t been paying enough attention or because you haven’t been around that long?

As a company we have been listed on the Australian Securities Exchange for just on four years, however for most of our life we were known as Mt Isa Metals.

We commenced life exploring in northwest Queensland.

A lot of my career, and that of the rest of the team, has been involved in gold mining, which meant making the move into a gold exploration play was a logical step.

Just over two years ago we moved into gold exploration in West Africa and just in the last month we changed the company name to Orbis Gold to reflect what we do, which is looking for gold on a global basis.

We’re very happy to have such a healthy starting point in West Africa.

Where are you in West Africa exactly, what are you doing there and what have you got?

We are exclusively focused on West African gold in the Birimian Gold Province, which is one of the richest gold provinces in the world having produced more than eighty one million ounce plus gold deposits across the region.

There are eight small countries that make up the province. We are in one of these – Burkina Faso, which was formerly known as the Upper Volta.

We have got a very large landholding in the country covering over 4,000 square kilometres of exploration permits.

There must be some traffic to negotiate on your way to site these days with the number of Australian-based companies operating in the country at present. Do you have any neighbours of any particular note?

Because our permit holdings are quite widely spread we have the luxury of having a lot of neighbours of sorts.

However, we are operating in the southeast corner of the country, which is a much less-explored and remote part of the country.

It has been overlooked from an exploration viewpoint so many of our core project areas that comprise large landholdings.

We actually hold the entire belt, so we don’t have any large-scale neighbours in that part of the world.

Burkina Faso must be a reasonable place to operate and do business if it is able to attract so many companies to set up shop there. What was it about the country that resulted in you making the move there?

When we originally looked at the region, as I said we had eight different countries to choose from, it really came down to a risk/reward approach.

The prospectivity is excellent in any of those countries; it just came down to the question of where we thought we would best be able to do business.

The Burkina people pride themselves on being upright, loyal and honest, which means corruption in the country is very low.

The landscape is much the same as you would see in many parts of Australia, you could be driving around thinking you are just near Kalgoorlie, and so we feel quite at home there.

It was really all about the ease of doing business in a country that welcomes us from all levels including the local villagers who love to see us there through to the government.

The government likes us being there, especially as we are investing money in the country, which the government considers to be a good thing for the country in the long term.

Could you run us through the projects you have there and what particular pecking order they may be in?

We have been exploring in Burkina Faso now for, just coming up to two years, so we are still relatively new to the country.

There are three main project areas that we are putting most of our funding into.

The Nabanga gold project is our headline project, on which we have just announced a maiden resource of 660,000 ounces at 6.5 grams per tonne gold from surface in what is called an intrusion-related deposit.

These can be very big deposits. It has been drilled over 2.3 kilometres of strike, it is open below 200 metres depth and we have very high hopes for a large scale system in that area.

That’s your headline project, what’s next in line?

Next we have one project in the far east of the country and another located in the far west of the country.

The first of these is a prospect called the Boungou gold prospect, which lies within highly prospective greenstone rocks at the south-west end of the Diapaga Greenstone Belt and is associated with major regional-scale faults.

At the other prospect, called Bantu in the far west, we have a suite of brand new high-order soil anomalies that we are really interested in drilling once the current wet season rains stop.

That’s quite a bit of work to get through. How do you have it all prioritised for the year ahead?

We have a very busy program scheduled for the year ahead.

We now have Nabanga basically operating as a project in its own right complete with a separate management team looking after things there.

Our aim is to double the resource at Nabanga and proceed to a pre-feasibility study after that.

One the other project areas it really is a questions of which of the targets we decide to give first priority.

We have multiple drill targets for the New Year; we have soil programs lined up ready to go.

We’re really just waiting for the rain to stop so we can get stuck in.

Has it been difficult for you to identify which of the prospect you should target first?

One of the problems we have had to face is that on the three main project areas we have already drilled we have made three discoveries.

So, we’re not in the position to place crosses next to any particular targets as we are literally finding gold where-ever we drill.

That’s the sort of problem I’m sure you will find some way of dealing with?

Success breeds success.

The market is highly-supportive of us and our results so far.

If we continue to achieve those positive results we would like think the market would still be there supporting us going forward.