ASX- and TSX-listed Perseus Mining has restarted drilling work at its Meyas Sands gold project in Sudan.

This initial drill programme, which restarted on May 20, is aimed at testing high-priority exploration targets in the vicinity of the Galat Sufur South (GSS) deposit to follow up other drilling results that have been received to date.

These results have confirmed the grade and tenor of the GSS deposit, and while incomplete, are considered very encouraging, the company said on May 27. 

Since acquiring the Meyas Sands gold project in May 2022, Perseus has focused on the development of the GSS deposit, and when possible, has conducted infill resource definition drilling, sterilisation trenching and drilling, a passive seismic survey, hydrogeological, metallurgical and geotechnical work in preparation for the inclusion of data in a front-end engineering design (FEED) study and a final investment decision for the project.

With the outbreak of hostilities in Sudan in April last year, however, exploration activities on the Meyas Sands gold project site were temporarily suspended.

Recently, Perseus’s personnel have re-established facilities to support on-site exploration activities and in-house security teams at the Meyas Sands camp.

“When Perseus acquired the Meyas Sand gold project in 2022 through the acquisition of Orca Gold, we were very excited by the prospects of developing a large-scale, low-cost, long-life gold mine in northern Sudan that would add a further high-quality mine to Perseus’s multimine, multi-jurisdiction asset portfolio.

"The outbreak of hostilities in the south and west of Sudan in 2023 represented a serious setback for Perseus’s ambitions for Meyas Sands, but the recent recommencement of drilling activities is considered a positive step forward that hopefully will lead to the development of the Meyas Sands gold project when peace is finally restored throughout the country,” Perseus chairperson and CEO Jeff Quartermaine said.

He added that the confirmatory drilling results that had been achieved so far at Meyas Sands were encouraging.

“We are now looking forward to returning further strong results that will lead to the conversion of the published foreign reserve estimate for the Meyas Sands gold project into an updated ore reserve reported in accordance with Joint Ore Reserves Committee 2012 on which a FEED study can be confidently based,” Quartermaine said.