Rimfire Pacific Mining NL (ASX:RIM) is to begin a dual strategy of conducting an economic assessment of its Sorpresa discovery in New South Wales parallel to reviewing the discovery potential in the wider Fifield district.
The company has appointed business development manager Craig Riley to oversee both the potential monetisation of Sorpresa and regional discovery growth through the technical field team.
A complete review and integration of all past work at Sorpresa will determine if the identified high-grade zones will provide sufficient mineralisation, at a suitable cut-off grade, to allow development of a mining operation.
This could then give Rimfire a future source of funding to assist with exploration costs.
Rimfire chief executive officer John Kaminsky said Craig Riley had the experience and technical skills to lead a full economic assessment of the Sorpresa existing resource.
Kaminsky said: “[Riley has] the knowledge to seek mineralisation extensions at Sorpresa and to discover further mineralisation in the Fifield project areas.
“The company looks forward to unlocking a potential pathway for economic success at Sorpresa with the objective of generating some cash for future extensional and regional discovery programs, which remain highly prospective.
“The gravity survey, currently underway, is the next step in this regional work.”
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Sorpresa’s gold and silver resource was discovered in 2011 and Rimfire confirmed in 2014 that it had intersected a new zone of mineralisation at Fifield.
The focus of ongoing work since then – including mapping, drilling and metallurgy – has been to advance the resource definition at Sorpresa.
This would provide a better understanding of the structural and geological controls on the gold and silver mineralisation as well as the processability of the discovery.
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The broader Fifield area remains prospective for further discoveries, including large-scale porphyry-style gold or copper-gold systems in the Ordovician volcanic geology.
This age of geology is host to the nearby Cowal and Northparkes mines, owned by Evolution Mining (ASX:EVN) and China Molybdenum, respectively.
There has been limited historical exploration work focusing on porphyry-style mineralisation in this area of Fifield as the rocks were misinterpreted as the wrong age.
The reassessment by Rimfire geologists and interpretation of the area as an Ordovician volcanic package has fundamentally changed the prospectivity of the area.