The Canada-based gold mining company Guyana Goldfields, which has been working to advance and develop its Aurora Gold Project here since 1996, last week committed to a time frame of “the first quarter of 2015” for the production of gold in Guyana.
The announcement that the company had adjusted its production time frame from 2014 to 2015 immediately attracted a comment from Natural Resources and Environment Minister Robert Persaud urging that ways be examined to revert to the original production time frame.
The company’s Chief Executive Officer Patrick Sheridan told Stabroek Business in an exclusive interview a week ago that the revision of the startup time for gold production arose out of deficiencies in a “non-optimised feasibility study published last year.
“In retrospect it [the outcomes of the study released in 2012]… was rushed and I do not think that proper guidance was given to the engineers, in the sense that they worked in isolation. One team was doing the mine plan, one team was concentrating on tailings. There was no cohesiveness in the study. There was no guidance and instruction given to them,” Sheridan told Stabroek Business. “What we ended up with in the April study at the end of the day was a project that, in my view and in the view of many in the industry, did not reach its full potential both in terms of profitability and in terms of its approach to the mine plan itself.”
And while the Guyana Goldfields top executive conceded that