Auric Mining’s Jeffreys Find gold project near Norseman in Western Australia has kept the company’s till ringing with another $1.65 million banked after it sold 1448 ounces to the Perth Mint to take its stage-one share to a more-than-expected $3.85 million.
The Jeffreys Find “pot of gold”, which is expected to keep pouring out next year, will fund Auric’s development of its bigger-play Munda gold project – and almost certainly take away the need for it to undertake any fundraising activities.
The company says the stage-one operations for the joint venture project it shares with Kalgoorlie-based BML Ventures are complete, but it is still expecting one final cash splash before the year’s end. Its most recent sale came at $3073 an ounce for a total of $4.45 million – a significant hike given it had budgeted on a gold price of $2600 an ounce.
The two companies expect to equally share profits of $9 million for the two-year project’s first stage … and anticipate an equal, or even better result next year.
Auric Mining managing director Mark English said: “We have received $3.85 million in cash so far, with more to come. This first phase has surpassed expectation. Though we don’t have final results, the Project will produce in excess of 9,500 ounces of gold from Stage One and it will generate more than $9.0 million in surplus cash, which will be split equally between BML and Auric. Near record gold prices are the icing on the cake.”
The Jeffreys Find project sits about 50km north-east of Norseman in WA, in an area which has had a long history of gold, nickel and precious metal exploration and mining. But despite that rich history, the area still appears to have plenty of exploration and production upside, as proven by goliath explorer, Astral Resources with its 500,000 ounces at 1 gram per tonne gold at its Mandilla project.
Auric’s operation is in the north-west-trending Norseman-Wiluna belt, an area of granite and greenstone terrain that is highly-attractive to gold and base-metal explorers given its late Archaean (greater than two billion years ago) convergent plate margin setting.
The project lies in highly-magnetic, south-west-dipping banded-iron formations, which are host to the gold mineralisation and are bounded by meta-sediments. It consists of two tenements, one of which is a granted mining tenement that has enabled the company to fast-track exploration activities since its relatively-recent ASX listing in February, 2021.
To become a producer within two years of starting exploration and be suddenly rolling in cash is something many small-cap companies could only dream about.
The Jeffreys Find resource of 1.22 million tonnes at 1.22g/t gold for 47,900 ounces sits within close to 100m depths and was confirmed by Auric’s maiden drilling program that was designed from historical work on the deposit.
With stage one now completed across two campaigns for 175,838 dry metric tonnes processed at the Greenfields Mill in Coolgardie, final reconciled production and economic details are imminent.
The second stage of mining is expected to kick off early next year, with its short mine life set to be finalised by early 2025 at the latest. It will no doubt stack more coins into Auric’s bank account as management sharpens its focus on the Munda gold project at Widgiemooltha that it considers its main game.
In a tough economic environment for raising funds, the company is “killing the pig” with its self-funding strategy emanating from the type of small resource at Jeffreys Find that would often be laughed out of town.
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By Lisa Wells
