Oar Resources has expanded its footprint at its nickel, copper and platinum group elements Crown project in the Julimar district, about 70 kilometres north east of Perth in the vicinity of Chalice Mining’s amazing Gonneville deposit. A new land access agreement has opened up a raft of new potential targets that will form the focus of Oar’s ongoing soil sampling and mapping in the area.
Oar has been methodically exploring its landholdings at Crown as it looks to zero-in on drill targets and the company’s recent efforts have been focused on the project area’s eastern margins.
Over 300 soil samples have been collected to-date from the priority target area and the samples have since been submitted for analysis.
Management says it anticipates the results from soil sampling will be returned later this week and will be subsequently used to generate targets for its first phase of drilling.
Interestingly, the Crown project lies a mere 8km away from Chalice Mining’s much-lauded Gonneville nickel, copper and PGE deposit that has kept tongues wagging since releasing a stonking set of numbers from its maiden resource estimate last week.
Figures for Gonneville clocked in at a stellar 330 million tonnes grading 0.58 per cent nickel equivalent and 1.6 g/t palladium equivalent.
The Julimar project has been the talk of the town since a discovery hole at the Gonneville prospect within the Julimar project last year hit 25 metres at 2.0 per cent nickel, 0.9 per cent copper, 8.5 grams per tonne palladium, 0.9 g/t platinum, 0.1 g/t gold and 0.11 per cent cobalt from 46m.
Remarkably, Chalice’s share price has soared from less than $0.20 prior to discovery to an intraday high of more than $9.90 this week.
According to Chalice, only seven per cent of the 26km strike at Gonneville has been tested so far, boding well for Oar’s recent expansion of landholdings.
Previous petrological sampling at Crown indicates the geological setting is highly prospective for nickel, copper and PGE mineralisation and Oar says geophysical trends across the project represent rock sequences akin to Chalice’s Gonneville discovery.
Elsewhere, the company recently launched a maiden diamond drilling campaign at its Douglas Canyon gold project in Nevada, USA. The quad-hole, 1000m program was aimed at targeting near-surface mineralisation in the first two holes and testing down dip depth extensions with the latter two holes. Previous exploration at the project drew some stellar grades including 18 grams per tonne gold and 398 g/t silver in rock chips.
If Oar can produce numbers that even have a sniff of PGE or nickel and copper in them, its location on the doorstep of Chalice’s big discovery will likely see it catapulted onto a few more radars.
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By Matt Birney
