ECR Minerals PLC (LON:ECR) has told investors on Tuesday that it has made encouraging progress in its follow-on gold nugget test programme at its Creswick project in Victoria, Australia.
The miner has started metal detector scanning of sample bags containing quartz collected from recent reverse circulation drilling. This will allow the group to assess which bags to send to the lab for full testing.
READ: ECR Minerals identifies more quartz than expected in drilling at Creswick gold project
ECR chief executive, Craig Brown, said the group has already detected metal content, which is likely to be “reflective of nugget gold mineralisation as samples from depth are unlikely to contain other detectable metals”.
“Our internal modelling suggests the Dimocks Main Shale is large enough to potentially host a multi-million ounce gold deposit at Creswick and therefore ECR are allocating resources to this project in a prioritised manner whilst continuing to develop our other Australian gold projects in parallel,” he said.
The metal detecting is the first step in the follow-on gold nugget test programme, which was launched after finding that previous assays from drilling may be unreliable.
The next step will be sending bags for further testing at the lab.
Last month, ECR revealed that a technical review of the drill programme and assay results had confirmed that the gold mineralisation is “nuggetty” in nature.