Junior explorer Meeka Gold Limited looks on track to beef up its one-million-ounce mineral resource at its Murchison project in Western Australia after hitting the go button on a high-priority drilling campaign. According to the company, the program will help it vector in on shallow, high-grade gold at the venture's St Anne’s prospect, that has so far not been included in its mineral resource estimate.
Previous drilling at St Anne’s delivered a slew of notable results including a 24m intersection going 4.81 g/t gold from 68m with a richer 4m interval going a cool 20.30 g/t gold.
Results from another hole include an 8m section at 2.66 g/t gold from 104m with a higher-grade 1m component running 16.45 g/t.
Earlier work at the prospect also produced a 36m intersection grading 1.02 g/t gold from 24m and Meeka says it will now seek ongoing success with the drill bit by targeting strike extensions of these results.
The company will also look to sniff out more of the precious metal across the western flank of its nearby Turnberry prospect, where a 610,000 mineral resource has already been outlined.
According to Meeka, the probe at Turnberry will look to build on previous work where several significant hits including a 16m interval going 6.67 g/t gold were struck outside of the prospect’s mineral resource envelope.
Other notable results from previous drilling at Turnberry include a 29m section going 1.95 g/t gold from 32m in one hole and 21m at 2.28 g/t gold from 100m in another.
The company is moving closer to a pre-feasibility study, or “PFS” for the Murchison gold project, earmarked for September and says it will feed the drilling results from its work at St Anne’s and Turnberry into the analysis.
The PFS aims to expand on a solid set of numbers delivered through a 2021 scoping study, that indicated the project could deliver a net present value of $124 million and a 46 per cent internal rate of return. The scoping study also indicated the operation could yield an EBITDA of $457 million and churn out an annual gold production rate of about 50,000 ounces per annum across its eight-year mine life.
Meeka’s flagship Murchison gold project boasts a collective 343 square kilometre landholding in the Murchison Goldfields and has a total mineral resource of more than one million ounces of gold.
A solid set of drill results from the company’s St Anne’s and Turnberry prospects could serve as a welcome boost to the company’s hopes of scrubbing up its gold resources at Murchison.
Things look to be heating up for Meeka with the multi-commodity miner also progressing a pair of proximal rare earth projects in addition to its precious metal ambitions. Recent exploration work at its Cascade rare earth elements project delivered a slew of samples with grades of up to 5791 parts per million total rare earth oxides, or “TREO”.
In addition to Cascade, the company’s rare earth portfolio also takes in the Circle Valley project about 50km to the east. Meeka recently launched a 16,000m probe at the operation and says it should have its hands on the assay results around June.
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