Minerals explorer Godolphin Resources has successfully completed a 27-hole 1111m diamond drilling campaign at its Narraburra rare earths and rare metals project in Central NSW. The company is now eagerly awaiting assay results with the aim of updating its mineral resource estimate early next year from a previous JORC 2004 compliant inferred resource.
The campaign, that came hard on the heels of a maiden four-hole campaign at Narraburra for 285m, was successfully completed despite adverse ground conditions caused by heavy rain across NSW in recent weeks.
Godolphin Resources Managing Director Jeneta Owens said: “It is a major achievement for the Company to achieve this important milestone. We continue to work diligently through the data associated with the drill program and have made great progress to date on sampling the drill cores. We will shortly submit all core for geochemical assays.”
The latest drill program was designed to test the resource potential both within and outside the previously defined area of mineralisation.
Godolphin dropped its proposed 4000m air-core drilling program due to long-range forecasts of wet weather events and the negative effect it would have on air-core sampling.
It was decided a diamond drill program would better mitigate such risks and allow the collection of higher quality core samples to be used in the mineral resource estimation.
The company went a stage further and added two extra holes to the original 25-hole schedule in order to twin drill holes made by previous explorers. Godolphin hopes assays from this pair can provide the confidence to include the historical results in the updated JORC estimate, expected in the first quarter of next year.
Godolphin’s tenements cover an impressive 3200 square kilometres in the Lachlan Fold Belt – an area highly prospective for gold, copper and rare earth elements, or “REE”.
Narraburra, south of Cowal, is located to the north of the company’s tenements around Gundagai and below a swag of land holdings between Dubbo and Bathurst.
Exploration at Narraburra over the past two decades has confirmed significant occurrences of REE including neodymium and praseodymium and rare metals such as zirconium, yttrium and lithium.
The project has a previously reported JORC 2004 compliant inferred resource by previous owner Capital Mining of 73.2 million tonnes at 1250 grams per tonne zirconium oxide, 327g/t rare earths oxide, 146g/t yttrium oxide, 126g/t niobium oxide and 118 g/t lithium oxide.
Godolphin picked up Narraburra, comprising a pair of tenements totalling about 350 square kilometres, when it inked a two-tranche farm-in and joint venture agreement earlier this year with private explorer EX9. That deal allows Godolphin to earn up to 75 per cent of the operation with $3 million worth of exploration.
The company says portable X-ray fluorescence, or “pXRF” results indicate rare metals mineralisation is present in the underlying fresh rock, that is a horizon untested by historical drilling, in addition to the weathered surface material.
Godolphin Resources hopes mineralogical work will help unlock the answer to the question of whether the rare metals in the fresh rock are in a form that can be economically extracted.
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By Matt Birney
