VANCOUVER (miningweekly.com) – TSX-listed gold producer Centerra Gold has received the Turkish pastureland permit for its Öksüt growth project, paving the way for the project’s future development.

The Toronto-based company advised on Thursday that its Turkish subsidiary Öksüt Madencilik Sanayi ve Ticaret (Omas) took receipt of the permit, together with a notice to pay a ‘grass fee’ of about $4-million to the Kayseri Directorate of Food, Agriculture and Livestock.

Omas will also have to pay a refundable deposit to the directorate to start a process to deliver land to the company. The process entails converting the pastureland to industrial use land and the company expects the land delivery process to take up to 45 days.

“Receiving our pastureland permit is a testament to the perseverance of Omas’s staff and their efforts to complete the permitting process for the project. Öksüt is expected to be another of the company’s low-cost operating sites, and the completion of the permitting process has now paved the way for the project’s future development,” CEO Scott Perry said in a news release.

The Centerra board is yet to make a construction decision on the project; the company expects this in late February.

Centerra has previously planned for first production from the mine in the second quarter of 2017.

The Öksüt project is planned as a conventional truck-and-shovel openpit heap leach mining operation. The operation will mine about 26.1-million tonnes of ore at a grade of 1.4 g/t gold, containing about 1.2-million ounces of gold over a mine life of eight years from two openpits – the Keltepe and the smaller Güneytepe pit.

A 2015 feasibility study found that, based on a gold price of $1 250/oz, the base-case scenario estimated that the project would have an after-tax net present value of $242-million and a 42.5% internal rate of return.

All-in costs, including taxes, were estimated at $777/oz and all-in sustaining costs came in at $490/oz.

Centerra said preproduction expenditures and construction capital would be $221-million, including a $25-million contingency. Payback on construction capital and preproduction expenditures was expected to be 2.5 years after production started, with life-of-mine sustaining capital being $10-million, excluding $30-million of capitalised stripping.