Newcrest Limited expect the awarding of the Special Mining Lease for the Wafi-Golpu Project in June next year.
Speaking at the Company’s Investor Conference, Executive General Manager, Craig Jetson, said the project has a wonderful ore body and is project of national significance to PNG.
The Investor Conference was held ion Sydney, Australia, on October 26th .
Jetson said following the submission of the Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) in June this year, the company are working with the PNG Government to finalize the necessary agreements to be required to enable them to approve the Special Mining Lease (SML).
“One thing for sure is that Wafi-Golpu is project of national significance to PNG, so there is a lot of excitement in PNG about this project, and they see it as a big part of the economic development of the nation,” said Jetson.
“Right at the outset when we started working through the process of the permitting with the Government we established an agreed timeline that we’d work on towards getting those permits completed and that timeline see’s us having the permits before June next year.”
He said they were fortunate to work with such a wonderful ore body and its perfectly suited to the technology they have been developing over the last 10 years.
“The beauty of Wafi-Golpu is that we can take all those learning’s from Cadia and apply them to a brand new ore body and really take the next generation of our cave-in technology forward.
“So it’s a pretty exciting time for us, we are in the process of obtaining our permits from the Papua New Guinea government, once we get those permits the project is ready to go. So the project has been extensively studied over a long period of time, and it is project ready.”
The Wafi-Golpu Project is a joint venture between subsidiaries of Newcrest Mining Limited and Harmony Gold Mining Company Limited.