In the Limousin countryside, at the end of a road that zigzags between the north of Dordogne and the south of Haute-Vienne, lies the old Bourneix gold mine, which has been shut down since Areva left, which extracted 25 tonnes of precious metal between 1988 and 2002.
It is in this area of 39.19 square kilometers, straddling the two departments, that the Ministry of the Economy issued, by an order published in the Official newspaper of February 16, an exclusive permit to explore polymetallic mines to Aurelius Resources, a French subsidiary of the British operator Aurelius Resources, for a period of five years. The “New Bourneix” permit authorizes the search for gold, silver, antimony, tungsten, lithium, nickel, bismuth, cobalt, platinum, rare earth elements… Gold was already exploited there in Antiquity.
“The potential is clear, estimates Dominique Fournier, the geologist recruited by Aurelius Resources to supervise the exploration work. Because, beyond gold, we can assume the presence of several other metals that our society needs to function. It remains to be seen whether or not extraction will be economically viable. » Three other permits had previously been issued in the neighboring sector of Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche (Haute-Vienne).
This burst of exploration authorizations worries part of the population. Consequences on the health of local residents, damage to the landscape, tensions around the use of water, devaluation of local residents’ real estate assets, etc. “There is no shortage of reasons”, breathes Corinne Bodin, 62 years old, recently residing in Chalard, the town which houses the old Bourneix mine, where she arranged to meet, at the foot of deserted buildings and settling basins filled with water. With Myriam Gantier, 43, also recently settled in Jumilhac-le-Grand, in Dordogne, she is active in the ranks of the Stop Mines 87 association.
Three weeks of consultation
Should we see this as a consequence of the regulation on critical raw materials adopted by Europe in December 2023, which sets the share of supply of critical materials extracted from European sites at 10% in 2030? The application for an exclusive research permit submitted by Aurelius Resources in April 2022 was processed in twenty months. It took two years for the Haute-Vienne prefecture to examine the three permit applications filed in October 2020 around Saint-Yrieix-la-Perche by the Compagnie des mines arédiennes, a subsidiary of the Canadian group Eldorado Gold Corporation.
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