Greatland Gold managing director Shaun Day highlighted the UK-based company’s “growth focused” strategy for the Havieron gold-copper project while presenting at the 2024 Diggers & Dealers Mining Forum in Kalgoorlie, Western Australia.
Speaking on August 7, Day commenced his presentation by describing Havieron as Greatland’s “flagship asset”.
Havieron is being advanced under an unincorporated 30:70 joint venture originally signed by Greatland and Newcrest in November 2020.
Newmont inherited the 70 per cent stake, as well as management of Havieron, when it acquired Newcrest last year.
“(Havieron) sits just 45 kilometres to the east of the existing Telfer gold-copper mine,” Day said.
“We’re in a joint venture there with Newmont, the world’s largest gold miner, and it’s a reasonably, very significant deposit. It’s already 8.4 million ounces (of) gold equivalent, and it continues to expand.”
Havieron is one of three pillars that make up Greatland’s “growth focused” strategy, with the company continuing to advance Havieron through to production by leveraging existing Telfer infrastructure to potentially derisk future operations.
“We have a very clear three horizons in our strategy, which is to deliver an expanded Havieron (and) continue to invest in the drill bit,” Day said.
“We think there’s a lot of option value in that portfolio that we can unlock and to continue to expand Havieron. And then, thirdly, in a financially disciplined way, we’re open to accretive acquisitions and business development opportunities to further build that growth profile within the company.”
Havieron’s feasibility study is currently in progress, targeting three million tonnes per annum throughput, with several value enhancing options underway to maximise value and de-risk the project.
Early works are also underway. As of June 30 2024, total development at Havieron exceeds 3060 metres, which includes over 2110 metres of advance in the main access decline. This represents about 80 per cent of vertical distance through to the top of the Havieron orebody.
“In terms of surface infrastructure, we’re actually just building some additional evaporation ponds as we speak,” Day said. “In addition to that, we will put in a pace plant ahead of stopping.
“Being 45 kilometres down the road from Telfer, we can leverage all the infrastructure that’s there. There’s a processing plant, power generation, stores, critical spares, bitumen, runway or airstrip, and a lot more, so this is effectively a relatively low-risk greenfield development to take advantage of that existing infrastructure.”
Earlier this year, Newmont announced its plans to divest its 70 per cent stake in Havieron.
Day previously said Greatland is “strongly positioned” to consolidate ownership of the project. He elaborated further at Diggers & Dealers.
“In February, (Newmont) announced the sale of eight assets. In their suite, Telfer and Havieron were two of those assets. Look, that’s something we’re interested in,” Day said. “We hold a last right of refusal over the asset.
“We enjoy a really strong joint venture relationship with Newmont, so we feel we’re really strongly positioned.”
Greatland will target an ASX cross-listing in the second half of 2024.
The company announced its intentions to trade on the ASX in May 2023 in order to “simplify its Australian operations, allowing for greater flexibility to pursue growth initiatives such as farm-ins and joint ventures.”
However, the UK-based company decided to defer the listing in September 2023 to the 2024 calendar year following “(a) careful reflection on a number of factors and opportunities”.
If successful, an ASX-listing can help Greatland buy back a majority stake in Havieron.
Alongside developing Havieron, Greatland will also focus on exploration and discovery across the highly prospective Paterson Province, the area in which Havieron and the Paterson South project it shares with Rio Tinto.
“We think we have some really good, high quality exploration ground, and we’re focused on unlocking the option value within that portfolio,” Day said.
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