West African Minerals has identified two new potential iron ore deposits in Cameroon and Sierra Leone from its recent geophysics and mapping programme.

At Sanaga, in Cameroon, WAFM will now carry out reconnaissance drilling and first stage metallurgy after a magnetic survey confirmed large areas of magnetite rich material at the surface and close to rail, port and power infrastructure.

Because of this potential, follow-up work at Binga, also in Cameroon and where WAFM has carried out some preliminary work is being deferred while the drilling at Sanaga is carried out.

Mr Anton Mauve MD of WAFM said that “The economics of the two new finds eclipsed results from its work on other licences in the region. Sanaga surprised in a very positive way and now outweighs Binga and everything else, though Madina ranked a very close second.

He said that “Sanaga was the last lease we got to and it wasn’t until we had a good look with detailed mapping and ground geophysics that we realised it all added up and was a phenomenal deposit. The key issue now is the metallurgical test as we know the iron grade and volumes are there.”

Mr Mauve said that results from the metallurgical work should be ready in 6 to 8 weeks or possibly even earlier, after which it will make a decision on which deposit it start drilling, though it seems pretty clear he expects Sanaga to be the priority going forward. For resource quality, style of resource, for shape, for proximity of infrastructure, existing infrastructure it (Sanaga) ticks all of the boxes. The only one it doesn’t yet is metallurgy, which we are working on currently.”

He said that Madina, too, has turned out far better than expectations. Located 70 kilometers from London Mining’s Marampa mine on the same hematite formation, it hoped to use six trenches dug recently to indicate a 100 MT deposit with good grades. But we know it’s going to better than that,” after a strike 1.5 kilometers in length with an average width at surface of 220 metres. First assays showed grades of between 38.5% and 41.4% iron.

He added that WAFM is looking at its options for Madina, which range from a standalone operation to a disposal perhaps to one of the nearby operations or even to overseas buyers.

(Source - www.steelguru.com)