Our mission is to excel in everything we do.
To sustain progressive expansion and diversity, while maintaining viability.

UMACO Pty Ltd AFRICA

Cameroon: Project 401-63

Politically stable country

  • Strong economy, regional powerhouse in CEMAC region
  • Clear legal framework (Ohada, mining legislation)
  • Free repatriation of dividends for foreign entities
  • Skilled and educated labour force
  • Currency (CFA Franc) pegged to the Euro, easy to convert
  • From a mining point of view, the District is still under-explored and under-exploited. This creates huge opportunities for early entrants like UMACO Pty Ltd

Our Mine:

  • UMACO Pty Ltd obtained an exclusive mining permit for the district including export license – mining operations can start immediately.
  • The license allows UMACO Pty Ltd to carry-out production, marketing, sales and exports of gold and diamond, and of any mineral or metal mined in that location
  • Our team has performed an in depth geological study, field surveys, soil analysis in SA lab
  • UMACO Pty Ltd has developed strong relationships with local authorities and government officials

UMACO Pty Ltd Strategy

  • Start with a small mine to generate cash flow quickly from alluvial and primary deposits
  • Use profits to grow organically and acquire additional permits

Our Competitive Advantages:

  • Capital investment in mining equipment for alluvial deposits is several magnitudes lower then for open pit or underground mining. The result is a much higher benefit/cost ratio.
  • The environmental impact is also considerably lower with simple land reclamation and mining methods that will be used will return the area to as close as possible to original condition.
  • Skilled team with extensive business and mining experience, including alluvial mining.

Gold Grades

Planned exploration campaign was conducted:

  • Samples tagged and bagged at location ensuring no contamination
  • GPS coordinates taken of each sample taken for audit trail
  • Samples taken mid way down gravels
  • Samples upgraded in GemetLab using Falcon concentrator to obtain gravity gold.
  • Gold analysis done by fire assay in ISO accredited company.



The District

Reconnaissance Survey:

Was undertaken in September 2010 and was identified as the primary target with a high potential for Au and diamonds.

Basic Factors:

Basic Factors for the development of alluvial-placer Au/diamonds deposits

  1. Abundance of Au/diamonds in source rocks
  2. Catchment – Drainage area
  3. Type and density of the drainage system
  4. Climate & Weathering of source rocks
  5. Vegetation

Abundance of Au in source has:

  • 17 known gold occurrences of which 4 new were discovered during the reconnaissance survey.
  • 3 known diamond occurrences most probably alluvial. However, as it will be shown, the number of Au occurrences that directly contribute to the Au potential of the district is much higher.

Alluvium:

14 alluvium samples collected during the reconnaissance survey showed a range of Au values from 0.04 to 14 ppm; average 3.4 ppm. In one case the -850 fraction showed an Au content of 25 ppm.

Primary locations
10 samples of quartz veins taken from active artisanal working gave a range of Au up to 20 ppm.

Artisanal Mining for Primary Gold

Catchment – Drainage Area

Catchment – Drainage area:

The total area of a catchment is an important factor. The total catchment area is much larger than the District itself. Based on morphological characteristics the total catchment area can be divided into four regions–blocks.

  1. Eastern region with the largest number of Au-occurrences (>35) with the direction of flow NW–SE. The total area of this region is 6149 km2. It actually represents the drainage system of the river. The total length of the all the tributaries is over 1500 km. Two alluvial samples taken along the main river gave 2.98 and 0.12 ppm Au.
  2. The Central region that covers 1728 km2, three medium sized rivers (up to 30m wide). The total length of all the flows is over 800 km. There are 12 known Au and 4 diamond occurrences. Three alluvial samples taken along the two main flows gave values of 2.17, 12.02 and 13.9 ppm Au. The forth sample taken along a small tributary gave only 0.03 ppm Au.
  3. The S-W region covering 698 km2 and only one know Au occurrence.
  4. Eastern region (691 km2) with a SW flow direction of rivers.

Type and density of the drainage system:

In order to optimally determine this factor a Landsat 7 ETM+ image was processed. Bands 4,3 & 2, as RGB were used (called False-Colour or NIR).

The vegetation in this combination is red in colour. A SRTM image was also used to enhance delineation of the streams and ridges.

Due to the fact that in this region the main foliant vegetation (trees) is along the rivers – streams. The presented detail clearly exhibits two things:

  1. The drainage is a typical dendritic system
  2. The drainage density is very high. The distance between two flows is rarely over 2 km. These factors are very important because it contributes to the high accumulation of gold (released from the source rocks by weathering) in the water system.

Climate, Vegetation & Weathering:

The District is located in a zone of semi-arid climate with the main rain season from September to May. As a result of this the level of forestation is low and mainly concentrated along the rivers and streams.

A majority of the region is characterised by grass, low shrubs and bare soil. This results in a high level of weathering of the rocks. In these climatic conditions the created topsoil is represented with laterite or lateritic soil.

What is more important is that the depth of weathering can reach over several tens of meters.

Result:

The heavy rains, practically in the form of flash floods, and absence of vegetation result in a massive mechanical transport of the weather rocks in to the rivers and streams. The final result is a high level of concentration of Au in the alluvium and formation of placer deposits.

Other Factors

Other Factors Besides the above geological – geomorphological factors several other factors can have a considerable effect on the complexity and economy of mining:

  1. Accessibility to planned mining site
  2. Liaison with local authorities
  3. Skilled work force and local workers
  4. Logistic support–Infrastructure and Local Resources
  5. Environmental Protection

Infrastructure

Landsat images, Goggle Earth maps and the reconnaissance work indicate a very low road density. If extensive mining should be carried out in the District it is evident that some very basic access roads and, eventually bridges will have to be made to move the equipment from one mining site to the other.

There are several larger towns, all within a two hour drive. Three phase electrical power is available from the national grid less than 10km from the main road.

The number of villages, with a population of several hundred to several thousand, guarantee that there is no problems in hiring local labour. Skilled workers a part of the artisanal miners are engaged.

All this also has a very positive effect on the whole community and public relations with the local authorities.

Environmental Protection

The Local Government laws for the protection of the environment are very strict. The above map shows that the District is outside all protected zones. Therefore no special permission will be required for construction of roads, dredging etc.

Accessibility to planned mining sites:

One of the more significant problems that could raise the cost of mining is the construction of roads for relocating the equipment from one location to the other.

Two of the most common nightmares in these operations are

  1. Relief
  2. Dense jungle forests with swamps In the case of the District both of these factors are negligible.
    • The relief is represented with low hills separated with small to medium streams and rivers. Gradients of the hills is low enough that rugged 4x4 vehicles would be able to travel off road.
    • The only vegetation (trees) is in the zones of the water flows. This eliminates numerous problems for cutting down the trees (permissions), protection of the environment, etc. Routes can be navigated around trees to the mining zones
    • It can be assumed that most of these access roads can be made with the use of local labour. Only short distances of roads less than 5 km would need to be cleared for equipment access to mining zones.

Inferred Resources

In order to evaluate the economic potential of the District, JORC Inferred Resources were determined for four rivers – locations which were considered to be the most favourable at the moment.

The main parameters and their characteristics for the evaluation of Inferred Resources are:

  1. Ore grade: It is well known that the grade is characterized with a high variance even on a cm scale.
  2. The variance of the length of the river bed: Where mining – dredging is possible, depends on many factors, width, depth, configuration of the river bed, type of equipment etc. This variation is usually in the range of several tens of metres.
  3. Depth and width of alluvium that can be mined: This depends on the configuration of the bedrock and is the most difficult to determine. The type of equipment also plays an important role.

For the evaluation of Inferred Resources the following data was used:

Landsat images

  1. SRTM topography
  2. Observations collected during the reconnaissance survey
  3. Data on the hydrographic network
  4. Rivers selected: Kadei, Boumbe2, Mifek, Mama and Beke
  5. The extension of the dredging areas were assumed on the basis of all the available data (field observations, satellite images, etc.). These will depend on the type and size of equipment that will be used.
    Regardless of the fact that almost all parameters are inferred the obtained results give an basic insight of the economic potential. The adjoining table gives some basic resource estimates.

Acknowledgement