B2 Gold spent $10 million on exploration at Ondundu between 2015 and 2021.
Osino Resources (TSXV: OSI; US-OTC: OSIIF) is acquiring B2Gold’s (TSX: BTO; NYSE-AM: BTG) Ondundu gold property in Namibia in a cash and share deal worth $15.2 million.
The nearly 20,000-hectare property is about 130 km from Osino’s Twin Hills gold project, and about 250 km northwest of Windhoek in northern-central Namibia.
Heye Daun, Osino’s CEO, said the company “plans to build on the excellent exploration and resource development work which B2Gold has completed over the last six years and to quickly advance the project to compliant resource stage.”
B2 Gold, as project operator, spent $10 million on exploration at Ondundu between 2015 and 2021, including 48,765 metres of reverse circulation, diamond drill and rotary air blast drilling. According to Osino, the project has seen a total of 73,568 metres of drilling since gold was discovered in 1917, but “has only been systematically drilled over the northernmost 1.5 km of a 2.7 km long target.”
“The Ondundu gold project has the type of mineralization with potential to host a significant open-pit gold resource possibly in the order of more than 1 million oz. of contained gold with the possibility for co-development with Osino’s Twin Hills gold project,” Daun stated in a press release, adding that in his view the transaction is “highly accretive” and “provides significant additional scale, diversification and consolidation of Osino’s Namibian projects.” Osino has a large ground position in the country of about 6,700 sq km within the Damara sedimentary mineral belt.
The shallow plunging, steeply dipping stratiform deposit at Ondundu has open pit potential, Osino believes, and preliminary metallurgical testwork indicates that the project is amendable to gravity recovery methods, according to Osino.
“A potentially feasible co-development route thus could entail mining/crushing/milling and gravity pre-concentration at Ondundu with subsequent concentrate trucking and further processing at Osino’s Twin Hills gold project,” an Osino press release stated.
The company’s Twin Hills project, has a resource of 13.5 million indicated tonnes grading 1 gram gold per tonne for 430,000 gold oz. and 42.6 million inferred tonnes of 1.08 grams gold for 1.47 million ounces.
At presstime in Toronto, Osino was trading at C28¢ per share within a 52-week trading range of C$1.01 and C$1.61.
(This article first appeared in The Northern Miner)
