Novo Resources has produced a suite of high-grade gold assays going up to 12.01 grams per tonne after an intensive reassessment of core from past drilling at its Belltopper project in Victoria – just 50km south of Agnico Eagle’s world-class Fosterville mine.
The company says its re-assaying of 11 historic diamond drillholes has confirmed multiple mineralised intercepts across several priority target corridor zones prospective for gold and other “in-demand” minerals.
Management says it was moved to undertake the re-assaying program armed with the belief that core from many of its gold-prospective zones was not originally sent to the lab by previous holders of the project area. It says the program involved gold and multi-element assaying and the results validated gold intervals identified during its re-logging activities.
Interestingly, the results also confirmed high-grade gold-antimony reefs that were never assayed during past exploration drilling programs. It comes as several ASX-listed companies with antimony deposits have been on a vertical run in recent days due to China’s export ban on the alloy-hardening mineral.
Novo says the re-logging program has provided valuable confirmation of controls on higher-grade mineralisation encountered at the project and refined the expected position of several target reefs and key structural features, such as its modelled high-grade shoots and high-priority target anticline corridors. The exercise has provided management with an improved understanding of the project’s prospectivity, mineralisation style and key controls on the high-grade zones that lie within its ground.
Belltopper displays intrusive-related mineralisation with characteristics similar to that seen at the stunning, low-cost Fosterville operation that was responsible for extracting 4.2 million ounces of gold by the end of last year.
Novo Resources executive co-chairman and acting chief executive officer Michael Spreadborough said: “Belltopper in Victoria is an exciting high-grade gold project, located in a proven gold jurisdiction. The excellent work completed by our geological team, which has uncovered multiple significant intercepts including grades of up to 12.01g/t Au, highlights the exciting opportunity we have in front of us to further explore and develop Belltopper into a project with size and scale.”
Results from the re-assaying program included 6m at 4.37g/t gold from 169m including a 5m hit going 5.18g/t at the Never Despair Reef and the Butchers Gully Fault target returning intervals of 2m at 7.19g/t from 52m including 1.15m at 12.01g/t from 52m and 2m going 3.87g/t from 43m.
The company has an intriguing set of targets with the NW Fault 4 and NW Fault 9. Both are believed to belong to a set of gold-bearing, west-dipping structures that form part of the anticline-related epizonal targets similar to Fosterville-style mineralisation.
The NW Fault 4 was intersected 80m downhole and represented by tectonic-fault breccia rocks, with gold intervals of 2.1m at 3.82g/t including a 0.6m slice at 9.74g/t. Elevated levels of antimony, bismuth, molybdenum and tungsten were also present.
NW Fault is interpreted across a 320m strike length and is modelled to interact with the Missing Link granite. NW Fault 9 may represent an extension of NW Fault 4, being mapped to the north and having returned a solid 2m hit at 15.18g/t gold from 9m in diamond-drilling reported in June.
Management believes that both faults display similar mineralisation and multi-element characteristics and where it could really get interesting, is that they have a combined target strike length of about 1km. It says the recent results indicate intersections associated with the Never Despair and West Panama reefs highlight the potential for a network of high-grade gold reefs to be discovered at the site.
Novo notes that the key historic reefs at the project have been subjected to only minimal testing using modern exploration methods. Its current focus is to deliver an exploration target to follow up a perceived network of high-grade reefs and to grow its pipeline of high-value, shallow and deeper drill targets.
After a successful program of revisiting much of the historic drill core that has been kept at Melbourne’s Drill Core library in the outer suburb of Werribee, the company will be champing at the bit to test its many new targets with the drill bit.
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By Craig Nolan
