By: Wonder Guchu

Osino Resources co-founder and CEO Heye Daun says his company intends to fast-track the Twin Hills mine in Namibia through production, with the first gold output expected by the middle of 2025.

Twin Hills gold mine is in the Erongo region, about 20 km from Karibib and 150 km from Windhoek.

Daun said Twin Hills is a long-life, low-cost and economically robust open-pit gold mine with low capital intensity and significant upside.

“This is a project that demands to be built, and that is exactly what we intend to do,” he said.

Daun said they were pursuing a ‘go-it-alone’ strategy that will see the company transitioning from being an explorer to being a miner.

“In anticipation of this, we’ve already started building the capability that we will need to construct and operate a mine,” he said.

According to Daun, they discovered Twin Hills under sand and calcrete cover using some very innovative exploration techniques based on methods developed in Australia but extensively adapted to Namibian conditions.

“The result of our exploration effort – which is still ongoing – is that we have a total resource of 3 Moz and total proven and probable reserves of 2.15 Moz at a grade of 1.04 g/t,” he said.

With the Twin Hills’ gold deposit open at depth, Daun said further discoveries are possible.

Osino Resources announced their pre-feasibility study (PFS) for the Twin Hills gold mine on 6 September 2022.

The study contemplates a low-risk, technically simple open-pit mine that uses contract mining and feeds a conventional carbon-in-leach metallurgical plant processing five million tonnes of mineralised material per annum.

Osino said the Twin Hills project’s pre-tax net present value (NPV) is US$783m, and the internal rate of return (IRR) is 33% at a 5% discount rate and US$1700/oz gold price, while post-tax NPV is US$503m.

According to the PFS, the project’s overall capital cost is US$375mn (incl. US$41m contingency, US$22m capitalised pre-strip, US$20m solar plant and US$8m grid power).

The PFSW sets the life of the mine (LOM) at 13 years with a 5.0 million tonnes per annum processing capacity. It says the annual average gold production for the first four years would be 200koz at US$890/oz all-in sustaining cost.

The tudy further says the average annual gold production in the first 10 years would be 169koz at US$930/oz all-in sustaining cost; and that LOM average production is 152koz at US$939/oz.

Daun told Mining Review Africa that the processing route Osino wants is similar to that used at Otjikoto, but the Twin Hills plant would be bigger at 5 Mtpa capacity.

He said the Otjikoto plant was built with a capacity of 2.8Mtpa and is at about 3.5Mtpa now.

“While it’s always possible that we might be approached by an established miner who might want to acquire the project or partner with us, the current state of the M&A market makes this an unlikely scenario,” Daun said.

In Twin Hill’s case, the company says it moved fast from Greenfields discovery in 2019 to PFS within three years when they completed 220 000m of drilling.