Stonewall Resources Ltd's (ASX:SWJ) shares added 12.5% yesterday to $0.027, with two million shares changing hands, which is the most active trading day in the stock for several months.
Stonewall's core focus is the TGME project in South Africa, which is located in a gold rich region and has past historical production records.
The share trading activity came after the company revealed preliminary results to investigate a high grade, multiple-level gold reef system as part of Project Bentley, which is located within TGME.
TGME has an existing CIL plant which is under refurbishment, and the nearby mines provide the pathway to gold production potentially in 2018.
Stonewall aims to build a solid production platform to over 100,000 gold ounces a year based primarily around shallow, adit-entry hard rock mining sources.
The timing could be right for Stonewall as the price of gold continues to rally, adding 6% over the past month to US$1330 an ounce.
Latest from Project Bentley
Many of the horizontal gold reefs are stacked vertically one above the other and multiple flat reefs, which illustrates the potential to be accessed via low-cost, open cut mining.
The areas of focus are Theta Hill and Columbia Hill.
At Theta Hill, an exploration target of 3.4 million tonnes to 5.6 million tonnes has been established, including the Lower Theta seam with a target of 1.0 million tonnes to 1.7 million tonnes at 16.6g/t to 26.6g/t gold.
Drilling is planned with the aim to establish a resource base for potential open cut mining operations, and subject to funds could start in coming weeks.
The Theta Hill area is adjacent to the TGME CIL processing plant.
Robert Thomson, managing director, commented:
"Project Bentley is named after Mr Phil Bentley, a geologist who worked at TGME with Rand Mines in the 1980’s and 1990’s and conduced a lot of the preliminary sampling work which has led to prioritisation of the area for exploration, with the aim to delineate additional ore to feed the TGME processing plant.
"Mr Bentley is still consulting today. Despite 130 years of mining operations in the Pilgrim’s Rest and Sabie area, never before has the mostly paper records and data been integrated into a comprehensive 3D computer model.
"In many cases we are finding physical plans, some dating back to the 1890’s, containing a wealth of information about past mining activities that we previously didn’t know existed."