De Grey sets its sights on Indee Project

WA company De Grey Mining has announced it has plans to acquire the $15 million Indee Gold Proj-ect.

Indee Gold is located immediately west of De Grey’s Turner River project and east of the North West Coastal Highway near Port Hedland, and hosts gold mineralisation across five shallow open pits.

De Grey executive chairman Simon Lill said the company had signed an agreement with the mine’s owner, China’s Northwest Nonferrous Australia Mining, to evaluate the property ahead of purchase by July, 2018.

Mr Lill said the additional project would provide scale and development momentum as it dovetailed well with the Turner River project.

“The better the scale, the better the economics,” Mr Lill said.

He said the number of employ-ees who would be hired for the project would depend on scale, add-ing that it was hard to suggest numbers “even in a broad sense”.

However, he said when Indee was previously owned by Range River Gold, the project employed around 50 people at a much smaller scale.

Mr Lill said it was likely the project would have a preference to hire locally, but a decision on that score would be made further down the track.

He said the project would open up the potential to transition into gold development mode and, if it went ahead, De Grey could be in production by the end of 2018.

Mr Lill said the acquisition was likely to occur around the same time as the project was being financed.

Indee hosts a total resource of 6.66 million tonnes at 1.6g per tonne of gold for 345,000 ounces across the measured, indicated, and interfered classifications.

Indee gold mine produced 30,000oz of gold between Ap-ril, 2006, and October, 2008, when it was placed on care and maintenance.

It is said to host significant shallow gold mineralisation and resources similar to the Turner River Project.