Karma Gold Project

 mine, gold mine

The Karma property is comprised of six contiguous exploration permits: Goulagou, Rambo, Kao, Rounga, Tougou, and Youba which together total more than 856 square kilometers. Orinally the project was 100% owned by True Gold Mining Incorporated but on March 4, 2016 Endeavour announced a friendly deal where they would acquire True Gold for about Cdn$240 million in stock, with Endeavour paying 0.044 of its share for each True Gold share. This transaction gave Endavour 90% of Karma and led to the current ownership of Endeavour with 90% and the government of Burkina Faso with 10%.

Regionally Karma is located in the Goren greenstone belt which is east-west trending and one the larger Birimian greenstone belts in central north Burkina Faso. Local geology is comprised of a folded sequence of greywacke, siltstone, shale, and volcaniclastic rocks. In the western margin of the project area there is a broad north-south magnetic lineament that is interpreted as a first order, crustal scale, sinistral, shear zone called the Ouahigouya Shear Zone. It extends to the south into the Hounde Greenstone Belt and branches into a series of north-east trending sub shears that cross the property.

Many areas of the Karma project area are overlain by lateritic units that are dominantly gravels and cuirasse that form a highly indurated upper part of the lateritic regolith. Several lateritization events have resulted in weathering to depths of up to 120 m. Due to the laterite and sand cover the extent of bedrock outcrop is limited. As of early 2018 six mineral deposits have be identified on the property and those are: Kao, North Kao, Goulagou II, Goulagou I, Nami, and Rambo. The deposits have characteristics of mesothermal shear hosted gold deposits associated with orogenic activity and structurally controlled, orogenic, hydrothermal deposits.

Historically several companies have held and conducted work on permits within the current project area. In the 1990's portions of the Kao permit were held by Channel, Kinbauri, and Ashanti Exploration who conducted soil and rock geochemical surveys but let the permits expire.

From 1994 to 2000 Channel Resources Limited had a licence to explore which included the entire Goulagou, Rounga, and Youba permits, portions of the remaining three, and was part of a larger 2,300 km2 exploration permit that was under option from a local individual. That permit lapsed in 2000 and then in 2002 the individual owner reacquired the Goulagou and Rounga permit to cover the main known artisanal mining sites. Those permits were then optioned to St. Jude Resources Limited in 2002 and 2003, and in 2005 Golden Star acquired St. Jude.

Work was done on the Rambo and Nami deposits, which were at the time part of the former Rambo permits, by Incanore Gold Mines Limited that included an RC drilling program in 1997. The Incanore permit expired in the late 1990's. In 2009 artisanal miners started working on the Nami(Namissiguima) deposit and at one time there were over 8,000 miners on site.

In the Youba permit area geological mapping of two targets that totalled 6.25 km2 was conducted by Bureau d'Etudes des Geosciences des Energies et de l'Environnement of Ouagadougou, Burkina faso (BEGE) in 2013. As a result of this work litho-structural maps were created for both areas. Other work at Youba included work at the Saima deposit where SAGAX carried out a Gradient Array IP/Resistivity electrical geophysical survey. The results of this survey indicated an excellent correlation between gold workings and a strong conductive anomaly that extends north-easterly and follows the main litho-structural trend.

True Gold carried out work over a 180 km2 area lying north of the main Karma Project that involved drilling 449 vertical Rotary Airblast test holes at an average depth of 30m, totaling 11,039 m. A target called Watinoma was further tested for near surface gold mineralization in 2013 using RC and diamond drilling.

The six Karma deposits will be mined using conventional open pit methods in sequence with work occurring in no more than 2 pits at once. Mined ore will be crushed and processed using Heap Leach technology. Three types of ore occur and will be mined from the pits: Oxide, Transition, and Sulphide. Oxide and Transition ore is leachable from all deposits but sulphide ore is leachable only from the Rambo and Nami deposits. Sulphide from Goulagou I, II, and Kao is not recoverable using heap leach so if required that ore would need to be processed using another method.