Royal Road Minerals JV gets preferred bidder status for Jabal Sahabiyah Exploration License in Saudi Arabia

Royal Road Minerals Ltd has announced that it and MSB Holdings have been awarded preferred bidder status for the Jabal Sahabiyah Exploration License in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia’s Asir Province.

Following a competitive licensing round, the companies said the license will be granted to their 50-50 joint venture vehicle, Royal Road Arabia (RRA), subject to the payment of a performance financial guarantee — to be agreed with Saudi Arabia’s Ministry of Industry and Mineral Resources — and the satisfaction of certain legal and regulatory requirements.

The license will have an initial five-year term, with an option to renew every further five years for a total of 15 years. RRA has committed to a minimum expenditure of US$5.5 million over the first five years.

Expenditure is success dependent subject to surrender of the performance guarantee, the companies added.

The Jabal Sahabiyah Exploration License is approximately 284 square kilometres in area and was discovered as a result of regional mapping by mining company Riofinex Ltd in the late 1970s.

The prospect is located in the highly prospective Nabitah-Tathlith belt and consists of copper-zinc-lead mineralized gossans and vein-gold occurrences hosted in greenschist and amphibolite facies meta-sedimentary and granitoid rocks.

Drilling into one of the gossan occurrences by Riofinex revealed results that included 14 metres (m) at 0.6% copper and 5.1% zinc from surface and 6.5m at 0.9% copper and 0.6% zinc from surface.

“Over forty years have lapsed since exploration work was conducted at the prospect area and ore deposit studies, surface and subsurface exploration techniques have advanced significantly over that period,” Royal Road president and CEO Dr Tim Coughlin commented in a statement.

“We will be deploying our own drone-borne hyper-spectral scanner, gamma ray spectrometer and magnetometer and expect to have teams on the ground, mapping and sampling at Jabal Sahabiyah imminently.”

Coughlin said the company will also continue with Our ongoing target generation and reconnaissance exploration activities which it is conducting at-pace and intensity, country-wide, across Saudi Arabia.

“These operations have already resulted in the identification of new prospect areas and the submission of promising exploration license applications,” he said.

“Saudi Arabia is promoting an exciting new vision for mining and exploration, and we are proud to play an integral part in this truly transformational process.”

MSB Holdings CEO and chairman of Royal Road Arabia Tareq Telmesani added: “Saudi Arabia's vision for the mining sector is world-leading, and it is an honor for our organization to be at the forefront of mineral exploration at this exciting time.

“We believe this will be the first of many opportunities for Royal Road Arabia, and we will continue to strive to utilize all of our resources and expertise to ensure we are an integral part of the mining sector in the Kingdom."