Projects
Manas is the largest and most active gold explorer in the Kyrgyz Republic, with a strong focus on the highly prospective south-west. We have nine prospects covering 4,408km² and are currently concentrating on the 4,200km² semi-contiguous seven-project South Kyrgyz Gold Project.
Our current JORC Resource base, across two projects, is 1.25 million ounces of gold and with 54 ranked prospects, we are aiming to grow rapidly.
Every drill program so far has discovered significant gold mineralisation and we will continue to drill aggressively. Another drilling program has started with more than 10,000m planned at a number of prospects including Shambesai. Of our 54 prospects we have only drilled five.
In September 2011 we reported a significant upgrade to Shambesai’s Indicated and Inferred Mineral Resource to 11.6 million tonnes at 2.1 g/t gold for 766,000 ounces of gold (0.5g/t gold cut-off). This is an increase of approximately 20% on the previous Shambesai Mineral Resource estimate of 645,000 ounces, with a marked increase in tonnes and ounces. Most importantly, all of the 120,000-ounce increase has been attributed to the high-value oxide resource, or an increase of 40% including reclassified material.
A pit optimisation study released in November 2011 has shown that Shambesai has the potential for net cash flows of up to US$190 million over the first five years by producing more than 200,000 ounces of gold.
Our Obdilla Project, located only 7km from Shambesai, has 485,000 ounces of gold.