Modern Prospectors Hope New Methods Will Pan Out With Gold Strike in Guyana

Deep in the jungle beside the Essequibo River, prospectors with sophisticated probing devices and computers are searching a long-abandoned mine for a possible wealth of gold missed by miners past.

A major strike could mean a big boost for Guyana, one of the poorest countries in the Western Hemisphere.

A far cry from the old-timers with their donkeys, sluice boxes and shovels, these miners have advanced university degrees and talk in terms of “economy of scale” and “profit margins.”

Their way of finding gold is to attach electrodes to the floor of the jungle to measure electrical resistivity and the magnetic and radioactive properties of the soil.

Readings go into a computer thousands of miles away in Vancouver, Canada, which constructs a three-dimensional model of the terrain and calculates whether an open-pit mine there could make a profit.

Past, Present Meet

As the prospectors work, the methods of the past spring before them.

They have found a soil sample dryer left behind by the Anaconda mining company, which abandoned the site in 1951.

A steam-engine water pump the size of a locomotive, carried into the tropical forest by a German consortium at the turn of the century, rusts on the jungle floor, entangled in vines and tree limbs.

And when a laborer finds specks of gold in a piece of ore, geophysicist Peter Kowalazyk and geologist Bruno W. Barde are just as keenly interested as the prospectors of old.

“It can be very exciting. It’s in the blood,” Barde said, examining a gold-flecked piece of stone.

Kowalazyk and Barde are with Placer Development Ltd. of Vancouver, one of North America’s largest gold producers, which is working here on a concession held by another Canadian company, Golden Star Resources Ltd. of Edmonton, Canada.

If it is determined the gold ore in the area is rich enough, Placer will invest $60 million to $150 million in an open-pit mine, Barde said.

Kowalazyk said the German consortium took out 60,000 ounces of gold from 1898 to 1904, using the traditional method of following a quartz vein. Anaconda also was looking for high-grade ore from 1947 to 1951.

“Instead of taking the quartz vein, we will take the whole thing,” Kowalazyk said. “What makes this possible now is the combination of computerization and open-pit mining.”

Tests Show Gold

James P. Stewart, vice president of Golden Star, said preliminary studies indicate that the Omai deposit is capable of yielding 200,000 ounces of gold a year. At today’s price of around $460 an ounce, that translates to $92 million a year.

“It is not a question of whether production will start, but of what size the plant will be. The decision will be made this year,” Stewart said at Golden Star’s Guyana headquarters in Georgetown, the capital, more than 100 miles downstream from Omai.

“This will be the first time in recent times a mining company has attempted to put in a modern plant in Guyana,” Stewart added.

Grantley Walrond, Guyana’s commissioner of geology and mines, said: “A small plant could produce five tons of gold a year. A larger plant would get eight tons of gold.”

At today’s prices, production from the smaller plant would equal around $70 million a year, about half of which would be invested in Guyana through operating costs, taxes and royalties, Walrond said.

A big gold find would mean a lot for Guyana, which has an annual per-capital income of $720 and a $1-billion foreign debt, with practically no foreign currency in its reserves.