The excitement is building: The promising gold explorer Sranan Gold (WKN A416C1 / CSE SRAN) has secured the necessary capital through a heavily oversubscribed financing round to vigorously advance the exploration of the Tapanahony gold project in Suriname. There is certainly no shortage of opportunities: the company has just announced additional targets for its first proprietary drilling program on Tapanahony, which is already designed for 10,000 meters. The focus is on the 4.5-kilometer-long trend called Randy-Poeketi.
The company has identified all targets using multiple exploration methods, including Lidar (Light Detection and Ranging) surveys, geophysical work, geological interpretation, exploration data from previous project operators, and on-site reconnaissance. Of particular importance to the Sranan team in this regard are also the activities of local gold prospectors, which are considered strong indicators of potential gold occurrences.
The target areas identified so far are referred to by Sranan Gold as Randy “’s Pit, Randy”’s Extension, Randy West, Poeketi Pit, West Poeketi, South Intrusion as well as Enard North and Enard South.
Major Progress in Developing Sranan Gold’s Tapanahony Project
Dr. Dennis LaPoint, responsible for exploration activities at Sranan Gold, sees the drilling program expanded to 10,000 meters – originally planned for 1,500 meters – as a major step forward in the systematic development of the district-scale property. He and his team are adopting an “adaptive” approach, relying on rapidly available analytical data from ongoing drilling and new structural and lithological data, among other things. Dr. LaPoint expects that this will significantly improve the understanding of the project’s scope and resource potential.
The initial drilling is planned for the Randy’s Pit target area, where the company primarily aims to benefit from historical drilling data from the previous owner Iamgold, but also aligns with the activities of local small-scale mining.
Additionally, Sranan will focus on the newly identified Randy’s Extension zone, which represents the continuation of the Randy trend to the southeast. The company believes there could be a potential granite contact here, which might be similar in mineralization style to the Oko West gold discovery in Guyana.
Sranan Gold will investigate this 1.6-kilometer-long trend with an excavator while it is on-site to support drilling at Randy’s Pit, aiming for maximum efficiency. The company intends to confirm the continuity of the Randy trend beyond its currently known extent – and later follow up with drilling.
Directly west of the Randy trend lies the newly discovered Randy West zone, which targets a parallel zone immediately west of the trend. Here, two approximately two-kilometer-long ridges show traces of historical pits and alluvial mining activities. According to Sranan, this suggests a nearby intrusive source. While the excavator supports drilling at Randy’s Pit, the company will begin trench sampling on the two ridges to investigate mineralization and generate drill targets along this parallel trend.
A True Gold Rush Has been Occurring in the Poeketi Pit Target Area since 2020
According to Sranan Gold, a true gold rush has been taking place in the Poeketi Pit area since 2020! The active mining is characterized by a high-grade, fault-laced vein system. The company plans to conduct drilling in the 350-meter-long open-pit mine, which contains both five underground tunnels and the 150-meter-long New Pit. Between these is a 260-meter-long ridge created by the fault-laced vein, which will initially be investigated through trenching.
In West Poeketi, Sranan plans to conduct trench sampling in the southern part of the area. Here, they aim to delineate mineralization structures to then select drilling locations. Additionally, a northeast-trending soil sampling campaign towards the northwestern boundary of the concession will later attempt to extend the known mineralization trends and identify additional areas for exploration.
In the southeast of the Randy Trend, Sranan recently identified the so-called South Intrusion target, where an arc of shallow drill core anomalies closely follows the contact between greenstone and intrusion, similar to Oko and Oko West. Anomalies identified by Iamgold through gold panning in this area indicate a potential source of mineralization. According to the company, this target area extends over five to ten kilometers along strike!
The newly identified target areas Enard North and Enard South combine detailed Lidar coverage with extensive alluvial gold mining. Both, Sranan emphasizes, point to the potential of the concession. On Enard South, Lidar surveys revealed two large-scale folds, confirmed by active small-scale mining. The fold axes correspond to anomalies identified in the catchment area during Iamgold’s gold panning sample. In this geological environment, which according to the company is similar to the Merian and Rosebel mines, Sranan will focus primarily on targeted mapping, sampling, and auger drilling to develop targets.
Conclusion: Following the recent financing, Sranan is well-capitalized and can now explore its Tapanahony property, which in our view is extremely promising, with a drilling program that has already been expanded from 1,500 to 10,000 meters given the project’s potential. But that is far from the end, because while drilling the already selected targets, numerous other areas, which according to available information are also extremely promising, can now be advanced to the point where drilling can follow here as well – as soon as possible. Incidentally, the team’s geologists are so convinced of the project’s potential that they recently decided to buy the required drilling equipment instead of renting it. This is intended to make the drilling program not only more cost-efficient but, above all, faster.
