Alkane Resources Limited (ASX:ALK) has received further broad, high-grade gold results from resource definition drilling on San Antonio and Roswell prospects south of the Tomingley Gold Operations (TGO) in Central West NSW.
Assays from the final 6,608 metres at San Antonio of the overall initial 60,000-metre program have been received and will be incorporated in a maiden resource calculation at the prospect, which is expected shortly.
Best of the latest results are 18 metres at 12.7 g/t gold from 117 metres, including 5 metres at 35.5 g/t from 120 metres, and 19 metres at 4.90 g/t from 104 metres, including 6 metres at 10.8 g/t from 113 metres.
Roswell resource
The San Antonio resource is expected to add to the Roswell inferred resource of 7.02 million tonnes at 1.97 g/t gold.
Roswell and San Antonio are immediately south of the TGO mine and processing facility.
Tomingley Gold Project covers about 440 square kilometres stretching 60 kilometres north-south along the Newell Highway from Tomingley in the north, through Peak Hill and almost to Parkes in the south.
The project contains Alkane’s operating TGO, initially an open pit mine with a 1 million tonnes per annum processing facility that has now transitioned to underground.
Regional exploration
For the past two years Alkane has conducted an extensive regional exploration program with the objective of defining additional resources that have the potential to be mined via open pit or underground operations and fed to TGO.
This has yielded broad, shallow high-grade intercepts that demonstrate potential for material project life extension and show that a return to open pit mining and/or underground extension is possible with appropriate resource confirmation, landholder agreement and regulatory approvals.
Alkane’s 60,000-metre resource definition drilling program has been designed to define initial inferred resources at both prospects and the company has received highly encouraging results.
High-grade results
Other San Antonio results:
- 9 metres at 1.40 g/t from 48 metres and 15 metres at 4.25 g/t from 75 metres, including 3 metres at 14.2 g/t from 87 metres;
- 30 metres at 2.06 g/t from 48 metres, 4 metres at 3.25 g/t from 84 metres and 8 metres at 1.57 g/t from 163 metres; and
- 13 metres at 2.77 g/t from 127 metres, including 2 metres at 11.1 g/t from 130 metres, and 27 metres at 3.24 g/t from 150 metres, including 3 metres at 15.3 g/t from 171 metres.
The company assayed 3-metre composite reverse circulation (RC) samples, however, where strong mineralisation was observed by the site geologist, it was directly assayed at 1-metre intervals.
Assaying of 1-metre re-split samples of 3-metre composites is ongoing.
These results are from 30 RC drill holes for 5,461 metres and two diamond cored drill holes for 1,147 metres at the San Antonio prospect.
The second phase of infill resource drilling across Roswell and San Antonio comprising a further 50,000 metres is continuing.