Transcription of The Stock Network Interview with Maritana Minerals (ASX:MRT), Managing Director and CEO Grant Haywood
Lel Smits: Maritana Minerals has delivered a 148% increase in gold ore reserves alongside a 6.3% increase in gold mineral resources, strengthening its position as an emerging Western Australian gold producer. Ahead of presenting at the Sydney Mining Club, I’m joined by Maritana Minerals Managing Director and CEO Grant Haywood to discuss the company’s resource and reserve growth, its cornerstone Burrara and Burbanks assets, and the next phase of drilling and mine planning across its portfolio. Grant, welcome to the Stock Network.
Grant Haywood: Yeah, thank you. Great to be here.
Lel Smits: Now, gold ore reserves have increased 148% year-on-year, while mineral resources have grown 6.3%. What’s driven this significant growth? And also, what does it mean for Maritana’s development pathway?
Grant Haywood: Yeah, I think it’s been well publicised that we want to be an emerging gold producer.
So we’re on that development pathway at the moment. And we’ve got a five-year life of mine plan. And the aim is to get more reserve into that five-year plan.
So we’re quite pleased that our reserve base is up to 204,000 ounces. And the key sort of increases there are our Craig project, which we’ve got a main resource on, and also our Kalpini project, which added 80,000 ounces to our reserve base. And then we had a bit of depletion from our project, which we’ve been mining more recently as well.
So all in all, we want to get as much reserve in as possible. We’ve got 200,000 ounces, which is about sort of two years out of our five-year plan. And we look to grow that further.
Lel Smits: Excellent. And with further drilling and mine planning underway across the portfolio, just how important are Berara and Burbanks to Maritana’s strategy? Also, its pathway towards becoming WA’s next standalone gold producer?
Grant Haywood: Yeah, look, they’re super important assets for us. They’re our two biggest assets.
So of our 1.9 million ounces, that make up half our resource book. So Berara, we’ve previously mined and know that asset really well, and around 400,000 ounces in resource. And we’ve been drilling out there at the moment, more so to get the resource confidence up.
So convert a lot more of that inferred material into indicators to get more reserve. And then also our Burbanks project, we’ve done a large program out there. We’ve completed phase one drilling, which was mostly infill.
So a lot of the resource there was also inferred. So 75% of the open pit resource and about 90% of the underground resource. So we haven’t actually quite had a reserve on our Burbanks project.
And currently it’s sitting at 466,000 ounces at a pretty good grade. So we’ll look forward to updating the resource, which will have a lot more indicator material and then we can start mining studies and to then convert a main reserve for our Burbanks project as well.
Lel Smits: Grant, thank you for the update from Maritana Minerals. Look forward to hearing more at Sydney Mining Club.
Grant Haywood: Thank you. It’s been a pleasure.
Ends