Ora Banda Mining has increased its Waihai gold resource by 190% to 2.46Mt grading 2.6g/t gold for 206,000 ounces. The company’s total Davyhurst project mineral resource now stands at 23.8Mt grading 2.6g/t gold for just shy of 2m ounces. A swathe of new drilling metres has been ploughed into the broader Davyhurst project in WA with the global resource now sitting at 23.8Mt grading 2.6g/t gold for just shy of 2m ounces.
The ASX-listed company has been furiously drilling out the project to achieve the resource upgrades, with a total of 65 RC and 15 diamond holes now providing much more confidence in the geology and contained gold at the project.
Ora Banda is now making moves towards further optimising its Waihai deposit with the initiation of detailed mine design work and metallurgical test work including baseline geotechnical and environmental studies, which will give it a head start for regulatory approvals.
Ora Banda Managing Director, David Quinlivan, said: “This very robust resource increase for Waihi is an excellent platform on which the development of viable mining operations at Waihi can confidently be planned. Our long-held view that Waihi would be a key component in start-up phase of the larger Davyhurst Gold Project has been significantly enhanced by this result.”
To understand the potential of the project’s economic capacity, the company has wrapped some modifying factors, or commercial metrics, around Waihi, such as mining assumptions, gold price and metallurgy.
The company said that a detailed assessment of the Waihi deposit resulted in an expected “open pit resource” of 2.1m tonnes grading 2.4g/t gold for 159,000 ounces and the “underground resource” was 400k tonnes grading 3.8g/t for 47,000 ounces of gold.
The open pit mining resource is based on a proposed “pit shell” with a forward gold price of AUD$2,400 per ounce and a cut off grade of 0.5g/t gold.
According to the company, this gold price represents a realistic outlook and is within a reasonable 10 to 15-year time frame for economic extraction, as required by the JORC code.
The underground resource was based on a higher gold cut-off grade of 2g/t, which the company says is reflective of the higher underground mining costs.
The Wahai complex contains the historical Waihi, Homeward Bound and Golden Pole deposits, collectively mined over many years for around 133,000 ounces of gold.
Notable results from the drilling included 34m grading 3.44g/t gold from 75m and 21m grading 5.25g/t from 64m.
Ora Banda’s Davyhurst gold project is located 120km northeast of Kalgoorlie where it houses a mothballed, 1.2 million tonne per annum processing plant which by all accounts, should shake free of its mothballs sometime this year.
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