The Porgera gold mine in Papua New Guinea (PNG), out of production since 2020, is close to resuming production after the country's government, the local subsidiary of Barrick gold and New Porgera signed a new agreement to speed up the mine's restart.
Through the New Porgra Progress Agreement (NPPA) signed late on Thursday, all parties committed to moving forward with the reopening of Porgra, starting with the application for a special mining lease.
Mark Bristow, chief executive of Barrick, said: "This has been a long process but along the way we have secured the support of all stakeholders." "Reopening the mine would represent another triumph for our host-country partnership model, which has been so successful in Tanzania and is now being used in the Reko Diq copper-gold project in Pakistan," Bristow said.
In 2020, Barrick and its partner, China's Zijin Mining, fell out with the government and locals over benefit-sharing as they tried to renew the mine's licence.
The impasse was resolved in April 2021 through two deals that gave the PNG government a majority stake in Porgera. Barrick and Zijin agreed to halve their stakes.
New Porgera, as it is now known, is 51% owned by Papua New Guinea stakeholders, including local landowners and the Nga provincial government.
The economic benefits will be shared 53 percent by Papua New Guinea stakeholders and 47 percent by miner Barrick Niugini Limited.
The huge gold mine is an open pit and underground mine in Papua New Guinea's Enga province, about 600km (370 miles) north-west of Port Moresby.
It has an ore body with a measured and indicated resource of 10 million ounces and an inferred resource of 3.4 million ounces of gold.
Before care and maintenance, it produced about 600,000 ounces of gold in 2019.
After initial production and optimisation at the Wangima mine, Porgera is expected to produce an average of 700,000 oz a year.
