Six months after nabbing the once-dormant Santa Barbara gold project in Colombia, Aguia Resources has triggered a gold rush with a maiden pour of the yellow metal.
Six months after nabbing the once-dormant Santa Barbara gold project in Colombia, Aguia Resources has triggered a gold rush with a maiden pour of the yellow metal.
As part of its ongoing exploration efforts, Aguia has started to excavate a new crosscut from the Santa Barbara workings to remove a major bottleneck and provide a much-improved circuit to access deeper, untapped zones of the neighbouring Mariana system.
The upgrade will also allow for underground material to be removed through the Santa Barbara adit.
With the existing above-ground treatment plant already operational, the company is pushing ahead with the construction of a new crushing circuit to grow production. The crushing circuit was designed by Medellin-based engineering and fabrication company Oro Sinu SAS.
The expanded circuit includes a run-of-mine bin, crusher feeders, conveyors, primary and secondary jaw crushers, a screen and a tertiary pulveriser crusher to manage oversized material. Four new agitation tanks have been added to allow for increased gold production.
Oro Sinu has already purchased ancillary equipment including a thickener, Merrill Crowe precipitation system, gold room equipment and several underground two-tonne wagons.
Aguia’s rapid development of Santa Barbara fits well with the company’s broader growth strategy of running multiple income producing resource projects in South America.
It plans to use the cashflow from Santa Barbara to fund the capital requirements of its southern Brazilian Tres Estradas organic phosphate mine in Rio Grande do Sul, another near-production project.
With the full environmental approvals in its back pocket, Aguia believes it is on track to produce 100,000t of rock phosphate per year by the middle of the year, eventually ramping up to 300,000t per annum.
To keep its funding requirements low, the company recently revealed it had moved away from the idea of building its own processing plant. Instead, it has locked away a long-term lease on a nearby processing plant that needs minimal expenditure to get up to speed.
The shift appears a smart move, since a 2023 bankable feasibility study suggested that a standalone 300,000t production plant could have cost the company as much as $26 million to build.
The study also forecast annual earnings before interest, tax, depreciation and amortisation of $22m for an 18-year mine life with a payback period of just 2.9 years. Given the company has instead chosen to lease an existing plant, the project’s economics and rate of return look even better.
A year ago, Aguia was languishing in the backwaters of the ASX junior explorers index, with little money and a project bogged down in long term legal issues.
Wind the clock forward a year, and under its new stewardship, the company appears to be starting to make serious waves with cash coming into the kitty from Santa Barbara, backed by a runaway gold price, which is currently trading just shy of its all-time highs at US$2760 (A$4423) per ounce.
If it is able to get production up and running by mid-year at its Los Tres phosphate project, 2025 could shape up to be a game-changing year for Aguia.
Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: mattbirney@bullsnbears.com.au
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