St George Mining has launched an 18-hole diamond core drill search for copper and gold at its Paterson project in Western Australia’s East Pilbara region, aiming to prove up encouraging preliminary results from its maiden air core drill program last August.
That campaign identified chalcopyrite and metasediments, known to host base metal mineralisation in the region — findings that triggered airborne, electromagnetic and ground gravity surveys and the diamond drill program originally planned for October last year but postponed until now.
The Paterson province, the site of St George’s project, covers around 30,000 square kilometres. St George received its first licence in December 2019 and started exploration in February the following year.
Much of Paterson province remains unexplored but it has already given up some significant gold and copper deposits.
Most notable is one of the largest copper discoveries in recent years — Rio Tinto’s 503 million tonne copper-gold deposit at Winu, 50km south-west of the Paterson project.
Besides Rio, other large players in the area include Fortescue Metals, Oz Minerals and Newcrest and some have established joint ventures with junior companies.
St George says data suggests there may be similar geological settings in the Patterson project to the Winu deposit and hopes its second drill program confirms its suspicions.
The company’s 18-hole drilling program marches across multiple targets along a 35km strike of prospective stratigraphy. Maximum drill depth of between 215 and 245m are planned for the first 10 drill holes.
St George Mining, Executive Chairman, John Prineas says: “The targets being tested are high priority areas coincident with favourable structural features seen in the data from gravity and airborne magnetic surveys completed by St George.”
Two target areas have been prioritised: one in the project’s north, where three holes are planned to investigate structural fold sequence and the other towards the southern tip of the tenement to follow up on previous mineralisation and structural targets.
Last year’s air core program ran into drilling problems caused by cover sediments and some holes could not be completed because of the ground conditions. Cover sediments also contaminated selected samples, making reliable assays difficult.
However, most of the holes drilled still intersected target metasediments at the end of the holes.
St George has switched to diamond drilling to manage the environmental issues and the company believes diamond drilling could also provide substantial extra geological, structural and geochemical information from the target metasediments.
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By Matt Birney
