Aurum Resources has hit sulphides in all drillholes bar one as part of a maiden drilling campaign at its Penny South gold project. The activity is targeting structural anomalies along strike from the high-grade Ramelius owned Penny North deposit and the historical high-grade Penny West mine. The company is currently halfway through an 18-hole program for a total of 5,000 metres.
Geology intersected so far has comprised of mafic and ultramafic schists, basalts and granodiorites. Within eight of the nine holes drilled to date trace levels of sulphides with quartz veining has been logged showing predominantly pyrite and galena.
Just a stone’s throw from Penny South is Ramelius Resource’s Penny North project that Ramelius paid Spectrum Resources around $400m to acquire in both cash and stock.
Penny South sits adjacent to and on the same shear structure as the Penny North deposit that was only recently discovered by Spectrum Resources in 2019 before it was taken out by Ramelius. The Penny North deposit has been aggressively drilled since then and now houses a resource base of 620,000 tonnes grading a stellar 15 grams per tonne gold for 300,000 ounces.
Penny South also borders the historic Penny West open pit that was discovered in 1990 and mined as a high-grade open pit from 1990-1991. The Penny West pit produced approximately 154,000 tonnes grading 18 g/t gold for 89,000 ounces.
Surprisingly Aurum’s Penny South project has seen little historical drilling despite some solid historic gold hits including 2m grading 33.98 g/t gold, 6m going 1.27 g/t gold and 5m that gave up 1.11 g/t gold. Much of the historical drilling in the area is considered inefficient by the company with the majority of drillholes reaching less than 40m down hole.
Aurum is in the enviable position of being able to draw from the successful strategies of surrounding and previous explorers in order to laser target its drilling efforts at Penny South. With some early positive geological signs starting to appear it’s now a matter of waiting for some drill assays to see if Penny South can live up to the reputation of its two older siblings it shares a postcode with.
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