News

September 01, 2009

Marengo Is Cashed Up And Ready To Go: The Feasibility On The Yandera Copper-Moly Project Is Now Fully Funded To Completion

By Alastair Ford

Ask Les Emery what he’s going to do with the A$16.3 million he’s just raised in Canada and Australia for Marengo Mining, and you get a succinct and clear answer: “Drill holes”. As Marengo’s managing director he’s certainly in a position to decide, but the simplicity of that response belies his 35 years in the mining industry. Marengo’s ongoing feasibility study at its Yandera copper-moly-gold project in Papua New Guinea has about 15 months to run, and much of the drilling that Les refers to will go towards proving that the 1.3 billion tonne resource there can be worked up into an economic proposition. At the most recent resource update, Marengo booked an indicated resource of 527 million tonnes at 0.38% copper equivalent, and an inferred resource of 766 million tonnes at 0.33%.

Shame that the copper price was on its knees when that resource was first released to market, but not such a shame now that copper is back on its uppers. You might not have credited it at the beginning of the year, but summer 2009 wasn’t such a bad time to be out looking for new money for a sizeable copper-molybdenum project. Sentiment took a little while to turn, according to Les. He’s perhaps got more of a feel for the global picture than most, since while Marengo’s base is in Australia, it...