Excalibur Mining to upgrade existing resource base
Thursday, November 12, 2009
Excalibur Mining to upgrade existing resource base
Emerging gold explorer Excalibur Mining (ASX: EXM) has announced plans to upgrade the company's existing resources base as it unveils further drilling results from the Tennant Creek reverse circulation drilling program.
The RC drilling campaign is part of the Perth-based company's strategy to upgrade the existing gold resource base prior to commencing engineering and feasibility studies early next year.
Progress on the current drill campaign at Tennant Creek is a key element of Excalibur’s overall strategy for FY2010 to fastrack the clear delineation of the company’s highly prospective gold projects.
The drilling program was intended to assess the specific assets contained within the Tennant Creek portfolio with a view to developing separate business cases to be independently defined and progressed as appropriate. The assets include tailings from previous mining at Nobles Nob, multiple near surface open pit-able resources around Nobles Nob, Juno gold resource and Juno copper resource and M10 gold resource, situated some 200m vertically below Juno.
Excalibur managing director Tim Lagdon said the successful drilling campaign would now allow the company to prioritise the next stage of exploration and drilling, with a more focused concentration of activity and resources as the project moves towards pre-feasibility.
“Excalibur will announce a new resource estimate for the near surface assets following a more detailed analysis of the drilling results," Mr Lagdon said.
"We have also commenced a more comprehensive drilling program on the tailings to quantify the parameters and value of that asset now that we have established that they contain significant grade."
The results of the drilling program at Tennant Creek are in line with Excalibur’s overall strategic plan of developing a series of near-term resources which can be exploited to maximise the development potential of the larger Juno orebody and the associated deeper resource of M10.
Excalibur will be undertaking an independent review of the shallow resources which should allow for conceptual economics on the shallow projects and tailings material. The company will look to incorporate the findings into the Board’s strategic thinking and outline this in further announcements over the coming months.
The current drilling program at Tennant Creek has outlined five key objectives: 1. Infill drilling of our shallow resources around Nobles Nob, particularly Rising Sun and Weaber’s Find to increase confidence in resource position prior to engineering design and pre-feasibility work. 2. The testing of key prospective shallow anomalies not included in current resources portfolio, particularly the NM4 prospect. 3. Diamond drilling of Juno to test the open areas up dip and to the east. 4. Diamond drilling of Juno within the current Juno Resource envelope to provide structural, metallurgical, geotechnical and specific gravity information for engineering design and pre-feasibility work. 5. To conduct a preliminary test of the remnant tailings at Nobles Nob.
The RC portion of the program has now been completed and totalled 118 holes for 6,673m, while preliminary testing of the Nobles Nob tailings has also been wrapped up. Diamond drilling is continuing at Juno.
A total of 56 holes for 2,975m were completed at Rising Sun, with the highlights returned including 6m @ 22.19g/t Au from 32m and 6m @ 11.17g/t Au from 41m.
Mr Lagdon said the holes were designed to infill the previous drilling to a 10m by 10 m pattern in the area of the potentially open pittable section of the known mineralisation down to approximately 80m.
"There had been little previous drilling in the area surrounding the historic stopes," he said.
A revised resource estimate which includes the above drilling will be completed once all the drilling data has been interpreted.
The current resources estimate, based on the 2008 drill programme, totals 93,750 tonnes at an average grade of 8.11 g/t for at total of 24,459 oz.
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