ASX listed small cap gold explorer Classic Minerals has successfully exercised an option to acquire a 100% interest in two highly prospective exploration licences at its Forrestania gold project, near Southern Cross in WA.
The two licences constitute the emerging Kat Gap gold project, where the company has had a recent run of success with the drill bit, unearthing shallow, high-grade gold intersections near the hanging wall contact of granite and ultramafic rock sequences.
The Kat Gap project encompasses just over 37 square kilometres and covers a 10km section of the under-explored hanging wall contact at the southern end of the Forrestania greenstone belt.
Recent RC drilling by Classic on the contact has returned bumper results up to 5m @ 14.1g/t gold from 17m down-hole, 8m @ 19.05g/t gold from 32m down-hole and 10m section going nearly an ounce to the tonne from 28m down-hole, in separate drill holes.
The company is now free to test 3.5km of northwest-southeast trending strike at the prospective contact, but will initially focus on an 800m long section surrounding its recent high-grade results and confirm the width and tenor of historical drilling data in that same region.
The Kat Gap project has a non-JORC compliant resource estimate of 36,000 ounces at nearly 4g/t gold, so the new acquisition of a 100% interest in the asset is a real prize for Classic.
The company has purchased the Kat Gap project from private company Sulphide Resources Pty Ltd for $250,000 and a 2% net smelter royalty on any production from the area covering the two licences.
The project is located about 70km south southeast of Classic’s Lady Ada, Lady Magdalene and Lady Lila deposits, that collectively hold a JORC-compliant mineral resource estimate of 5.36 million tonnes grading 1.39g/t gold for nearly 241,000 ounces.
Classic CEO Dean Goodwin said: “We are very pleased to have finalised this transaction as the Kat Gap tenements will significantly strengthen the Forrestania gold project as a whole. We now control over 480 square kilometres of the highly prospective Forrestania region, in an area we firmly believe has the potential to host a world-class gold deposit.”
“Drilling campaigns by Classic over the last 6 months have shown the high-grade potential of this project. We have intersected some outstanding shallow zones of gold mineralisation over a 200m strike length with gold open at depth and along strike in both directions.”
“The next stage is to commence an RC drilling program extending the known mineralised zone north and south from our current 200m long drilling area.”
“We plan to focus our attention on an 800m long section of the main granite-greenstone contact where existing historical drilling is on 100m spaced lines.”
The Kat Gap ore system remains open in all directions, with the company saying that the high grades and shallow depths of the gold mineralisation at Kat Gap have enhanced the economic viability of establishing a future open pit mining operation at the deposit.
RC and diamond drilling programs for Kat Gap are scheduled to kick off again in late January.
The prospective area at Kat Gap contains a strong, coherent, +50 parts per billion gold-in-soil anomaly stretching over 5km of strike at the granite-greenstone contact, which has only been drill tested over about half of this length to date.
2019 is shaping up to be defining year for Classic in the under-explored Forrestania greenstone belt as it evaluates its greenfield exploration targets at the Kat Gap and Van Uden West projects and develops the more advanced gold plays at Lady Ada, Lady Magdalene and Lady Lila.
By Matt Birney
