CAMEC and Bauxite
In Mali CAMEC has a Joint Venture Agreement with Mali Mining House (‘MMH’) for the exploration and development of licence areas covering a total of 4,000 km2. These have been divided into three project areas: the 300 km2 Falea Project in south west Mali on the Senegal and Guinea border; the 2,500 km2 Bamako West Project; and the 1,200 km2 Sikasso North Project.
Under the agreement, CAMEC and MMH established an 80%-20% Joint Venture company which assumed ownership of the licences issued by the Malian Ministry of Mines, Energy and Water. CAMEC is providing the technical and financial resources required to progress the various projects, while MMH, a company established by members of the Malian Union Nationale des Opêrateurs Miniers ('UNOMIN'), a collective of Malian title-holders, will assume a 20% free-carried stake.
South Mali is known to have significant occurrences of bauxite, a raw material most widely used in the production of aluminium on a commercial scale. The combined bauxite resource of Mali and neighbouring Guinea is amongst the largest in the world. CAMEC has undertaken a review of the bauxite potential of Mali which confirmed that bauxites in the region are developed principally on exposed dolerite sills of Mesozoic age and that the potential generally within Mali is significantly greater than originally defined by earlier explorers with notable potential in the Falea, Bamako West and Sikasso Nord regions.
A recent field programme has confirmed the usefulness of the remote sensing technology in this particular application. Of note is the identification of the Sikasso Nord region, missed by earlier explorers, as being potentially a significant bauxite resource. Sitting 30-40km west of the San-Sikasso road and centred approximately 100km NNW of Sikasso, the region’s dolerite plateaux covers an area of approximately 10,000 hectares and from observed outcrops, shows a well-developed bauxitic profile with exposures of up to 15 metres in thickness.
