A mining company is aiming to start a medium to large scale alluvial gold and diamond mine at Tamakay in the Middle Mazaruni, Region Seven.
Tamakay Resources Inc (TRI) has submitted an application to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) for environmental authorization to undertake the gold and diamond mining operation on 1,482 acres of land situated at Tamakay. The company has also simultaneously submitted a mining licence application. The company hopes to start operations by mid year with first production in 2012.
An EPA notice in last Friday’s edition of the Guyana Chronicle said the project will entail the removal of overburden, mining and processing of ore deposits. It said that an Environmental Impact Assessment (EIA) is required before any decision to approve or reject the proposed project is taken since this development may have significant impacts on the environment.
Members of the public are invited within 28 days of the publishing of the notice to make written submissions to the Agency, setting out questions and matters which they require to be answered or considered in the EIA.
According to the project summary, the total disturbance footprint of the operation including the road network corridor is estimated to be approximately 550 hectares of state lands. It said the project will produce more than 8124.7 kilogrammes of gold for the five-year period. In addition to the gold resource, it has been confirmed through sampling and metallurgical testing that economically recoverable quantities of diamonds are also resident in the ore body, the summary says. It added that past and recent exploration and current mining activities had confirmed/identified the availability of approximately 4.875 Mt of ore, with an estimated project life of approximately five years.
The summary said approximately 140 people will be employed full time, drawn from a largely locally available pool of workers.
It said mining of the ore will be through conventional open-pit mining techniques using bulldozers to clear the mining area and remove the top soil which will be loaded with front end loaders and transported by haul trucks to top soil storage areas. The overburden will be stripped by excavators, loaded into haul trucks and transported to the waste dumps. The ore will be mined by excavator, transported by haul trucks to the processing plant stockpile. The project will not be using any chemicals in the process since it will recover gold by gravity concentration According to the company, the project has a resource estimate that contains 4.48 million tonnes of gold ores and an unknown quantity of diamonds. It said the feasibility study proposes a multi-element mining operation and draws on extensive studies and similar mining ventures that occur worldwide.
It said the study provides a clear indication that Tamakay could be developed as an economically robust, and medium to large-scale operation to provide gold and diamonds. Estimates indicate that Tamakay gold output could be the largest for a Guyanese owned company, it said.
“TRI has taken the decision to accelerate the development of the mining development following the strength of the results generated by studies to date. Significantly, the report has highlighted several areas where the project can be further enhanced to improve the efficiencies and economics surrounding the mining proposal of this scale,” it said.
