ASX listed Australian Potash’s drill program has confirmed a possible northward extension of a gold mineralised system from neighbouring tenements to the south into its Yamarna gold project in Western Australia’s Eastern Goldfields region.
Notably, gold anomaly levels intersected by the company’s aircore drilling are consistent with those reported from early drilling at Gold Road Resources’ Ibanez and Stratocaster targets where subsequent drilling has hit high grade gold.
Australian Potash said that an anomaly within target T15a has been found to stretch over a 2,500m strike length that remains open to the northwest and is up to 200m wide.
This is similar in scale to the early stage anomaly at the neighbouring Ibanez Prospect.
In addition, the northernmost line of drilling returned anomalous results stretching over 500 metres where historical drilling was only selectively sampled. This anomaly is open along strike.
The company plans to direct the remaining 16,000m of the planned 23,000m drilling program towards other drill targets.
Australian Potash Executive Chairman Matt Shackleton said: “The purpose of the program was to explore for the continuity of the mineralised system successfully identified by our southern neighbour.”
“CSA Global are now modelling the full data set of assays from the program and we are working through the process of finalising drill plans for Stage 2 in conjunction with them.”
This second stage program will include reverse circulation drilling to test the depth and primary mineralised structures.
In 2017, a structural review by CSA Global identified that the tenement area was conducive to Archaean orogenic gold style mineralisation, with a structural analogy to the southern Abitibi/Timmins in Canada.
The southern area of the Yamarna Gold Project was selected due to its proximity to neighbouring prospects and an interpretation of magnetic data suggesting the continuation of lithology between the two areas.
This is unsurprising given that drilling by Gold Road at Ibanez had returned very high grade results such as 10 metres grading 28.67 grams per tonne gold including 2m @ 136.57g/t gold and 8.2m @ 11.63g/t gold which included a 3.33m intersection grading 27.487g/t gold.
Interestingly, Gold Road and South Africa’s Gold Fields are constructing a gold processing plant at their Gruyere Gold Project that boasts a serious ore seserve of 3.56 million ounces just 60 kilometres to the southeast.
Whilst Australian Potash’s focus remains on its Lake Wells potash project and its JORC-compliant resource of 14.7 million tonnes of sulphate of potash – 12.7Mt of which is in the Indicated category, Yamarna could well emerge as a significant second project in its own right.
