St George Ready to Drill at East Laverton
THE DRILL SERGEANT: St George Mining (ASX: SGQ) is about to kick off a major drill program at the company’s 100 per cent-owned East Laverton project in Western Australia.
St George informed the market that the drill rig is on its way to conduct a reverse circulation (RC) drill program with its primary focus on a pipeline of gold targets the company has established across the three underexplored greenstone belts at East Laverton.
Targets on all three major greenstone belts will be drilled with over 5,000 metres of drilling planned, which will also include drill testing of a highly conductive DHEM plate at the Windsor nickel sulphide prospect.
At 210,000 Siemens, St George claims this to be the most conductive nickel sulphide target identified at the East Laverton project to date.
“Our technical team, in conjunction with our external experts – Dr Walter Witt and Dr Jon Hronsky, have dedicated considerable time in developing the pipeline of gold targets across the East Laverton project,” St George Mining executive chairman John Prineas said in the company’s announcement to the Australian Securities Exchange.
“We are pleased to commence drilling of these targets which have the potential for a significant gold discovery.
“The drilling of the extremely powerful EM conductor at Windsor has been much anticipated, and I’m happy to say that this outstanding nickel sulphide target will be the first to be drilled in this program.”
Past drilling by St George at the Windsor nickel sulphide prospect has resulted in numerous disseminated nickel sulphide intersections within channel facies komatiites, indicating an attractive exploration area for a massive nickel sulphide deposit.
Drill hole WINDD004, drilled by St George to test a highly conductive DHEM plate at Windsor, produced no conductive material in the drill core capable of providing the extremely high EM response that was modelled.
However, a DHEM survey data from WINDD004 identified a strong off‐hole EM anomaly about 5 metres to the north of WINDD004, indicating that WINDD004 came close to testing the conductive source but did not intersect it.
Nickel sulphide enrichment was identified in WINDD004 between 85m to 138m downhole with nickel values up to 1.05 per cent nickel.
St George believes the presence of nickel sulphide mineralisation adjacent to the DHEM plate supports the potential for this conductive target to represent massive nickel sulphides.
A pipeline of prospective gold targets identified by St George has culminated in the planning and prioritising of these targets for drilling.
St George explained the gold drill program was scheduled to commence at East Laverton in March 2017, but this was delayed due to unseasonal heavy rains in the North Eastern Goldfields that caused numerous road closures by local shires, and prevented access to the East Laverton project.
One advantage to the delay was that it enables St George to add further drill targets to the program, expanding it to over 5,000m of planned drilling.
Website: www.stgm.com.au