Riversgold Ltd (ASX:RGL) had company geologists onsite last week at the Northern Zone Intrusive Hosted (NZIH) Gold Project in Western Australia, scoping out details of the next drilling program on the tenure.
The company is focused on building a JORC-compliant mineral resource estimate in this next stage of drilling, having already received approval for a program of works and all site access requirements fulfilled.
RGL is interested in developing the NZIH Project as quickly as possible to take advantage of high gold prices, as the project has demonstrated startling gold recoveries of 92.9% on average from a 24-hour bottle roll cyanide extraction test.
Potential heap leach operation
“The reason RGL wanted to farm into this exciting gold asset at the time was because we could see the Australian dollar gold price heading towards A$4,000 an ounce,” Riversgold chair David Lenigas said.
“Its location, being only 25 kilometres east of Kalgoorlie and serviced by excellent infrastructure, makes it a very easy project to access, drill out, and move towards a maiden JORC-compliant resource.
“Its widths of mineralisation at over 100 metres, significant potential strike and drill-tested depth, make this a very exciting gold project with gold at over A$3,600 an ounce.
“RGL’s senior team was on site a week ago to scope the next drilling program and make plans to drill Northern Zone to deliver a maiden JORC-compliant resource.
“We see Northern Zone as being somewhat similar to Saturn Metals Limited’s Apollo Hill Gold Project and the early metallurgy points towards a potential heap leach operation.”
The project has a conceptual exploration target of 200 to 250 million tonnes at a grade of 0.4 g/t to 0.6 g/t gold for 2.5 to 4.8 million ounces of gold.
Recent data underlines prospectivity
Riversgold points to drilling data that delineated gold mineralisation to depth of 450 metres of vertical depth, validating the exploration model while also providing information about gold mineralisation widths and grades and its structural orientation.
Some of the standout results from drilling undertaken in 2021 and 2023 include:
- 330 metres at 0.49 g/t gold from 30 metres;
- 110 metres at 0.60 g/t from 208 metres;
- 154 metres at 0.58 g/t from 98 metres; and,
- 66 metres ay 0.89 g/t from 30 metres.
From here, RGL plans to undertake further metallurgical test work to optimise recovery methods and reagent consumption and undertake further drilling toward a resource estimate, with step-out drilling on 100-metre cross sections, particularly toward the untested southeastern areas.