Eagle Mountain to develop Guyana deposit aggressively – CEO

Eagle Mountain Gold is comfortable that its flagship project would be constructed within the next 18 months, as it aggressively pushes ahead to achieve production by 2014, President and CEO Ioannis Tsitos told Mining Weekly Online in an interview.

The company on Monday filed its updated Canadian National Instrument (NI) 43-101-compliant technical report, which increased the project’s estimated gold resource by about 35% from an earlier study completed in November 2010, with Canadian securities administrators.

The Eagle Mountain project is located in Potaro, (Region Eight).  Eagle Mountain Gold currently holds a 50% interest in the project, and expects to gain another 45% from Iamgold for Cdn$1 million, equivalent shares or a combination of both, by April.

The Government of Guyana owns the remaining 5%, which would be transformed to  royalty.

According to the report, Tsitos said a priority this year is to imminently start work on an environmental-impact assessment report in support of the mining permit application, which the company intends to submit by the end of the year. The company would also start work on a preliminary economic assessment, which it intends to finish in the second quarter (an earlier version of this news item had erroneously stated the fourth quarter).

While work would continue to further define the Eagle Mountain deposit, the company also has an option agreement to earn up to 95% in the adjacent Mowasi gold property, where there is a history of artisanal mining, the online report said.