Ora Banda Mining’s spread of gold deposits across its Davyhurst project, including an impressive 24 separate resources, will soon receive yet another shot in the arm courtesy of a successful drilling program at the rapidly developing Sand King project.
Standout numbers from the 16 hole program at Sand King include 5 metres grading 13.7 grams per tonne gold from 79m, 4.5m at 10.4g/t from 73m and 6.6m grading 6.1g/t from 5.2m.
The Sand King deposit sits within Ora Banda’s Siberia project area, which is about 37km south east of its Davyhurst processing plant.
At Davyhurst, there are five key mining camps including Sand King that contributes 2.45 million tonnes grading 3.4g/t for 268,000 ounces of gold to the global project resource.
The company said it has now updated the resource model and is currently looking at re-optimising the open pit designs to squeeze as much economic gold from the ground as possible.
Ora Banda said that the open pit mining reserve for Sand King is currently 1.1Mt grading 2.6g/t for 93,000 ounces of gold.
Managing Director, David Quinlivan, said: “…it is pleasing to see that the survey and assay results returned from this drill program at Sand King were largely consistent with the pre-drilling expectations of our technical team in terms of both grade and geometry. This outcome has strengthened our confidence in the viability of Sand King as a future open pit gold mine.”
Sand King has seen a few historical mining campaigns, principallybetween 1980 and 1991 when it churned out 747Kt grading 4g/t for 88,000 ounces of gold.
Ora Banda will now feed all of its new drilling results and ongoing optimisations into reserve updates and further down the line, its Davyhurst definitive feasibility study.
Davyhurst holds an impressive global resource of 23,200,000 tonnes of ore grading 2.5g/t for 1,840,000 ounces of gold.
Ora Banda’s Davyhurst gold project is located 120km northeast of Kalgoorlie where it houses a mothballed, 1.2 million tonne per annum processing plant, which by all accounts, should be dusted off some time this year.
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