Javelin Minerals has completed a maiden 22-hole reverse circulation drilling program at its recently acquired Eureka gold project, 54 kilometres north of Kalgoorlie in Western Australia’s Eastern Goldfields.
The 2779-metre campaign was planned to confirm and possibly expand the existing 2.45-million-tonne 2012 JORC-compliant resource, which averages 1.42 grams per tonne (g/t) gold for a contained 112,000 ounces of gold, from which 62,000 ounces are in the indicated category.
The company says it is undertaking mining and economic studies hoping to define a near-term mineable reserve of about 34,000 ounces from the indicated gold resource at the southern end of the Eureka open pit.
Javelin envisages toll treating ore at one of the nearby third-party processing plants and has already been in discussions with nearby operators.
The company believes that with favourable drilling results and modelling of the initial mining reserve, Eureka could be in production within 12 months.
At today’s Australian gold price of $5172 per ounce, that aspirational 34,000 ounces represents an in-ground value of just under $176 million before all reserve definition, mining, processing, milling and refining costs and recovery losses are factored in to take it to 99.99 per cent pure gold bars.
In addition to confirming the existing resource, the drilling program also explored the potential for high-grade lodes extensions below and northwards along strike from the current open pit.
Previous drilling of the lodes obtained remarkable gold grades that offer plenty of incentive for further determined testing.
Those intercepts include 4m assaying 135g/t gold from 53m, 6m running 19.58g/t from 41m, 4m at 11g/t from 42m, including 2m at 19.2g/t from 43m, and 3m going 48.75g/t gold from 129m.
Four important shoots - South, Epis, Deans and Mystery - lie directly beneath the floor of the current almost 350m-long open pit, where most of the historic drilling has been concentrated.
Other zones beyond the open pit limits, including the Southern extension, the North zone and the North West zone, are indicated by mostly thin historical drilling programs.
Javelin Minerals executive chairman Brett Mitchell said: “There is immense scope to grow the Eureka resource, with the mineralisation open and numerous targets to test, to incorporate with our near-term mining plan… We look forward to receiving the assays over coming weeks and then using these to help plan our follow up drilling program at the project.”
Javelin’s first drilling campaign put four reverse circulation holes into Eureka South, eight holes into the Eureka mine, three holes into Eureka North and seven more into the Eureka North West zone for a total of 22 holes along a 1200m strike.
The company says the holes successfully intercepted the targeted structures, based on logged evidence of more intense shearing, variable quartz veining and associated alteration comprising quartz-carbonate, with or without sulphides.
The Eureka gold deposit is within the Bardoc Tectonic Zone, which also hosts the important Paddington and Bardoc gold deposits.
Gold at Javelin’s Eureka open pit occurs within five lensoid mineralised shoots comprising quartz veins and quartz stringers up to 10m wide in intensely sheared, foliated and altered basaltic host rocks, within a greater shear envelope up to about 30m width.
The mineralisation is steeply east-dipping at 60 degrees, trends along a sinuous north-south strike and features several offsets and splays.
Javelin acquired the brownfields Eureka project with its existing resource from Delta Lithium last December and kicked off its first reverse circulation drilling program in mid-April, with a plan to see the work done and dusted within two weeks.
The drilling was undertaken by Topdrill under a drill-for-equity arrangement and was the first undertaken in four years. It was completed on schedule and Javelin expects to see the first analytical results from the work early next month.
Given some of the project’s historical drilling results, there is little doubt the company will be on tenterhooks waiting to see if some of those old high grade gold levels can be replicated. Achieving that could send Javelin onto a promising development trajectory.
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By Doug Bright
