Matt Birney

Anglo Australian will soon start its maiden exploratory RC drilling campaign at the Koongie Park gold project near Halls Creek in WA after receiving all site clearances to commence the field program. The company will target the Nicolsons East and Bulldog prospects, which lie in same prospective shear zone as Pantoro Limited’s Nicolsons underground gold mine, that reported a mineral resource of 393,000 ounces in May last year.

Azumah Resources has generated an updated ore reserve estimate of 18 million tonnes grading 1.77g/t gold for just over 1 million ounces at its Wa project in Ghana. This represents a 65% increase in the ore reserves last reported in 2014 and underpins a feasibility study that presently shows an 11 year project life, producing about 100,000 ounces per annum in the first 6 years.

Greenland Minerals has completed an optimised design for its proposed port facility to service the massive Kvanefjeld rare earths project in southern Greenland, allowing capital costs to be updated. The work by PND Engineers and China Communications Construction Co follows a revised design for the project’s plant and infrastructure delivered in late 2018 by Tetra Tech, which dramatically reduced civil earth working costs.

Kairos Minerals has uncovered additional gold anomalies over more than 10km strike at its emerging Croydon gold project, located near Port Hedland in the Pilbara region WA. Encouraging new assays up to 1.2g/t gold were returned from geochemical stream sediment sampling. The company is also reviewing a development pathway for its 643,000 ounce gold resource at the Mt York project, located 100km west of Croydon.

Southern Gold has confirmed narrow, high grade gold/silver mineralisation from an underground infill and extensional channel sampling program at its emerging Weolyu South epithermal precious metal project in South Korea. Results included 0.45m @ 30g/t gold and 1,280g/t silver and 0.55m @ 28.9g/t gold and 1,350g/t silver. A re-assay of 2017 samples also provided a significant 30% uplift in gold grades from the original analyses.

Venus Metals’ metallurgical testing of beneficiated oxide ores from the Youanmi project in WA, has shown that heated, sulphuric acid leaching produces recoveries near 80% of the contained vanadium pentoxide content, whilst rejecting 40% of the waste materials. Further work is underway to optimise the process flowsheet for the scoping study and Venus is presently updating the Youanmi mineral resource estimate.

Tyranna Resources’ partner Alliance Resources has identified a new gold target within the Wilcherry JV project in South Australia after re-assaying historic iron ore drill samples. Better results from the re-analysis of drilling carried out by Ironclad Mining between 2008 and 2012 at the Weednanna North prospect included 8m @ 1.06g/t gold from 58m down-hole and 22m @ 0.34g/t gold from 42m.

Blina Minerals ongoing due diligence work at the Maintirano copper project in western Madagascar continues to return encouraging results with eight samples returning more than 5% copper, including a sample that registered 37.5% copper and 33ppm silver. The company will now carry out airborne surveys to help locate additional vein systems as no modern exploration methods have been used at Maintirano to date.

Hammer Metals has received some encouraging news at its Perentie project near Mt Isa in Queensland, with its first pass RC drilling campaign returning some high grade copper results. Notable results include 1m @ 4.21% copper and 0.13g/t gold from 75m down-hole at the Paddy B prospect and 2m @ 2.36% copper and 2g/t gold from 37m down-hole at the Trackside prospect.