Buoyed by initial drilling results, Surefire Resources has booked a rig for April to drill out anomalies 400m northwest of its Yidby gold project in WA that returned 16 metres of gold at 1.39 grams per tonne from 16m downhole. The company said the figures suggest a new discovery area hosting a northwest trending structure with wide downhole gold results.
In January the company drilled an RC hole into a surface geochemical anomaly over a major northwest shear 400m from its mapped Yidby ore body. The company said the final results have greatly improved the moderate gold intercepts it already had under its belt.
The exploration represents a new centre of gold mineralisation according to the company, describing it as significant as it confirms the gold anomaly predicted from the company’s model and importantly, it occurs in a thick zone.
The Yidby gold deposit remains open to the north, northwest and southeast and Surefire said it had locked in a drilling rig to pepper up to 4000m into these extensions and previously untested mobile metals ion, or ‘MMI’ anomalies.
MMIs are elemental ions that have migrated from deeper orebodies through the rock strata towards the surface, an exploration approach Surefire managing director Roger Nikolaenko said had yielded positive results on previous projects.
In the east-south-east, drilling will test the possible extension of gold mineralisation intersected in the most southeast drilled section.
In other Surefire projects, the company recently completed a high-resolution aeromagnetic survey and first-pass exploration work at its Kadji Project in the West Yilgarn region of WA and confirmed the presence of nickeliferous ultramafic lithologies.
The project is considered highly prospective for nickel, copper and platinum group elements, or “PGE” and is in the same province as Chalice Mining’s Julimar Gonneville discovery.
According to Surefire, the Kadji project sits along the same trend as Gonneville and encompasses an area previously characterised as a block-faulted gneiss surrounded by Yilgarn Craton granites.
The company’s polymetallic ground at the project spans 25km of strike.
In addition to the broad polymetallic potential, the company also unveiled a string of historic gold workings in a set of northwest trending structures and a sequence of previously uncharted pegmatites north of the project area.
Both gold and PGE group elements are trading at historically high levels, and with a project in the well-addressed Julimar province, there could be plenty of news flow to watch coming from Surefire this year.
Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@businessnews.com.au
By Matt Birney
