After drilling the first 12 holes of an RC campaign at its Yidby gold project in WA, Surefire Resources is now planning to kick off work with RC and diamond rigs at its advanced WA vanadium and iron assets. The company reports the holes at Yidby designed to test gold anomalies and step-out from previous exploration has now been completed with assay results pending.
Drilling is continuing with Surefire expecting to expand the current gold mineralised footprint of the project’s Yidby Road prospect beyond its existing boundaries to the north-west and south-east.
The earlier drilling of the gold anomalies at Yidby returned wide gold intersections including 100m at 0.53 grams per tonne gold from 96m downhole and 32m at 3.68 g/t from 150m.
The gold-in-soil anomalies extend up to 400m west of an initial discovery zone where the prospect’s deposit of gold was first encountered.
On its vanadium front, a diamond drill rig has arrived at the company’s Victory Bore project in WA’s Mid West to extract core for geotechnical and metallurgical test purposes.
In addition, site preparation for RC drilling to infill the project’s 237-million tonne resource at 0.43 vanadium oxide is underway to upgrade economic parameters for a pre-feasibility study.
The company will be working towards its exploration target of 150 to 200 million tonnes at 0.4 to 0.7 per cent vanadium oxide, 22 to 40 per cent iron and 6 to 8 per cent titanium oxide.
Surefire believes its vanadium resource is one of WA’s largest as it contains more than 2.2 billion pounds of vanadium oxide.
In terms of the company’s Perenjori project — its advanced iron ore venture — the explorer will obtain samples through diamond drilling to reconfirm and expand on the previous metallurgical test work completed at the project.
Previous analysis indicates a quality concentrate of 66 to 70 per cent iron with aluminium and calcium oxides less than 5 per cent can be achieved by conventional magnetic separation with a relatively coarse grind of 75 microns.
Surefire has recently declared an exploration target of 870 to 1240 million tonnes at a grade of 29 to 41 per cent iron that may add to its existing resource of 191.7 million tonnes at 36.6 per cent iron.
RC drilling is planned to infill the resource, about 300km north-east of Perth, amid existing infrastructure — an important key to operating economic bulk commodities like iron ore.
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By Matt Birney
