RNG (RNO), nickel producer, adds gold production 1st half 2007
NOUAKCHOTT, Aug 22 (Reuters) - Canadian firm Rio Narcea Gold Mines Ltd. (RNG.TO: Quote, Profile, Research) is on track to start producing gold from a new 100,000 ounce-a-year site in Mauritania in the first half of 2007, its chief executive said on Tuesday.
The Toronto-listed gold and nickel producer said its planned Tasiast gold mine project in the northern Inchiri region was on schedule and would initially employ 200 local staff in the mostly-desert country straddling Arab and black West Africa.
"The Tasiast project is advancing as planned and this workforce should be increased when production starts in the first half of 2007," Chris von Christierson, Rio Narcea's Chief Executive Officer, told reporters in the capital Nouakchott.
He was speaking after meeting Colonel Ely Ould Mohamed Vall, head of the military junta which took power in a bloodless coup in the Islamic Republic just over a year ago and is leading the country through a transition to presidential polls next year.
Mauritania started producing crude oil in February and its shores, where the Sahara meets the Atlantic, contain some of the richest fish stocks in the world.
Yet despite its natural wealth and population of just three million, it is one of the world's poorest nations. Almost two thirds of its people live on less than $2 a day.
Rio Narcea said last August it was going ahead with developing the Tasiast project even though the projected cost had risen to an estimated $64 million on the back of higher oil and steel prices.
It also said then that open pits at Tasiast had enough reserves -- approximately 886,000 ounces at a gold price of $370 per ounce -- for eight years and that cash operating costs were expected to be about $240 an ounce.
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