article on nex metals in the australian

Good buying today - article in the Australian today probably explains people jumping on board

http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/mining-energy/a-galaxy-of-opportunity-awaits-or-does-it/story-e6frg9ex-1225795562923


Cinderella area

KENNETH Allen is an accountant by training but does not regard himself as one of those "St George's Terrace miners". (For those on the east coast, that's like being a Pitt Street or Collins Street farmer.) His grandfather was a manager at the famous Big Bell mine and his father, Bill, was named prospector of the year in Kalgoorlie three years ago.

Bill actually gets a mention in the release on Thursday from his son's company, Nex Metals Explorations (NME). This announcement concerned drilling at its Kookynie project 50km from Leonora and the intersection of visual gold beneath the historic Cosmopolitan mine. "That's free gold, and that's the ore body", Bill is quoted in the ASX release as saying when he looked at the drill core. We're not quite sure how that one slipped through the ASX announcement net (we know of cases where companies have not even been allowed to say they have visible gold) but it's a big call on a hole that went through 3m of quartz reef. The Cosmopolitan produced until 1912, with 300,000oz being extracted at an average grade of 16 grams/tonne. This is the first time anyone has drilled below the old Cosmopolitan.

But there's been plenty of drilling elsewhere on Kookynie - Allen says he has 600,000 historic drill samples on record. Part of the project was owned by the old Melita Mining, which went out of existence in 1996, and then another mining casualty, Sons of Gwalia, delineated a gold resource on part of the area.

Allen argues that this is not just another warmed-over brownfields project, but what he calls a "Cinderella" area that has only had sporadic and piecemeal exploration. Nex, which is about to mark its second anniversary, is taking a "super pit" approach, and there are as many as 10 old pits which had only the high-grade gold taken and which can be linked and brought into one operation.

Moreover, Allen says he can mine without the need to build an expensive treatment plant by going back to that now neglected method of heap leaching the ore, which he says makes it feasible to process gold grades as low as 0.25 grams/tonne.

Later they will go underground but even then would operate only a low tonnage mill.