Canadians Lead New Gold Rush in Romania

The Canadian gold mining company Eldorado Gold Corporation is ready to start a new gold mining project at Certej, in southern Transylvania, after completing a feasibility study.

The company intends to invest some $652 million US in extracting an estimated 44 million tonnes of ore from mine, worth some $3.2 billion US.

Eldorado Gold holds an 80.5-per-cent stake in the Romanian firm Deva Gold, which owns the Certej gold mine. The Romanian state is a minority shareholder in Deva Gold.

In unrelated development, another Canadian company, Carpathian Gold, on Wednesday said that its local subsidiary, Samax Romania, had obtained a 20-year minining licence for the Rovina Valley gold and copper project.

By Romanian law, the licence will only come into effect following a final review by several Romanian government departments.

It is the first time that the government has granted a licence for metal extraction that does not involve any state-owned company.

The Certej and Rovina mines are both close to the controversial Rosia Montana project, which drew strong opposition from environmentalists.

The Certej project itself stirred controversy for the way it obtained environmental approval in 2012 as cyanide will be used in the process of exploitation.

The Rosia Montana project was put on hold indefinitely following a vote in parliament last June.

Gabriel Resources, which had a licence to exploit the gold reserves through its Romanian subsidiary Rosia Montana Gold Corporations, RMGC, obtained a licence around 15 years ago. But it had struggled to obtain all the required environmental and archaeological permits.

The company had said it would use the latest environmentally-friendly technology and preserve Rosia...