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Sitting in a gold belt endowed with 7Moz of bullion, Ora Gold may have crept under the radar of late.But it’s high grade Crown Prince discovery in the historic WA gold field of Meekatharra has been a sleeping success story, one of a number of prospects that could turn into high grade gold deposits at Ora’s 217km2 Garden valley project.“We made a new gold discovery in the Meekatharra region in Western Australia, which is a high grade gold belt probably most well known for by hosting the Westgold (ASX:WGX) assets but it’s also recently had some takeover action with Ramelius (ASX:RMS) bidding $201 million for Musgrave Minerals (ASX:MGV),” new Ora Gold CEO Alex Passmore said.“So a very hot area and we’re discovering high grade gold near Musgrave’s project which has added an interesting extra bit of excitement.”Passmore says Ora, formerly Thundelarra Exploration, is well and truly in gold “elephant country”.“We’ve been drilling from surface hitting very, very good grades, looking very much like the clean metallurgy, standard WA Archaean lode gold hosted in quartz vein with a series of quartz veins there,” Passmore said.“Some of the highlights from the last quarter — 40m at 17.5g from 30m, 33m at 12.7g from 57m and then following up these high grade hits at depth we got 21m at 11g, including 9m at 22g/t from 121m.“So when we’re thinking about a resource and when we’re thinking about mining here, these grades are really spectacular. You don’t see these grades very often.“The ounces per vertical metre that we’re likely to see in an open pit scenario certainly is looking very, very impressive.”A good rule of thumb for an economic mine was around 500oz per vertical metre. Passmore said Ora was seeing the prospects to uncover double that, with infill drilling and an updated resource the coming steps for the WA gold explorer, which is well funded with around $4m in the bank.“What we envisage (is) the mine will eventually be an open pit followed by a high grade underground,” he said.“And we sit on a granted mining lease with native title in place, so all of that is a real plus and a good head start.
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