This is not new as all MM's were doing is looking at a statement...

This is not new as all MM's were doing is looking at a statement on page 3 in the MRE upgrade on 14 December and putting their own spin on it, as follows:

“Importantly, Never Never continues to emerge as an exciting growth story at depth, with recent visible gold intercepts having been logged below the current MRE boundary and awaiting assay. The deposit remains open and appears to be shallowing and flattening slightly to the south due to the flexure zone mentioned in Tuesday’s announcement. This presents as a tantalising target for a fan of directional drilling from a parent hole that we plan to drill early in the New Year to systematically understand the potential of Never Never Deeps."

See later in this post for details of directional drilling.

My view is that the NN drilling from January will focus solely on using directional drilling as the holes to end of December were deep and becoming costly plus time consuming.

Directional drilling will enable them to drill a lot deeper and a lot quicker (and cheaper) and find out what is in NN deeps and also below 4P and WW ie further south of NN at depth.

IMO the results of the directional drilling will possibly uncover the true potential of the NN, 4P and WW deposits at depth and could be a real game changer (but it may not uncover much) I am encouraged by the NN deposit widening at depth and moving to the south towards 4P and WW. SL stated in an interview last year in response to a question that SPR wants to know if NN, 4 P and WW join at depth and the directional drilling, from my research looks, like a great way to investigate this possibility sooner, rather than later and at a lower cost.

I assume the initial parent hole (they may drill more than one parent hole over time) will be south of NN between 4P and NN but I am just guessing. I am not expecting any assays until later in March except if they announce they have encountered visible gold before assays are released (which would be exciting). They may drill down to 1,000m or more using directional drilling, current deepest hole at NN is about 650m.

"In drilling programs where multiple holes are to be drilled with tight spacing, a branch hole program is a smart alternative to a standard drilling program. Particularly when the targets are at depth, as a standard drilling program will require significant amounts of drilling in rock formations of little interest before the target formation is reached.

In addition, natural deviation will make it challenging to achieve the required spacing pattern with standard drilling, potentially requiring adding additional holes to the program in order to properly define the resource.

A branch hole drilling program changes this by only requiring one or a few pilot holes to be drilled from surface. The remaining holes are started deep down in the pilot hole and deflected towards the target using directional drilling techniques, such as standard downhole motors, wedges, or our Directional Core Drilling technology. If managed effectively, multiple targets can be reached from each pilot hole in order to achieve the spacing requirements."