Northern Star drilling highlights Peake potential
THE DRILL SERGEANT: Emerging gold producer and exploration company Northern Star Resources has completed the first round of drilling at its Ashburton gold project in Western Australia.
Northern Star has told the market the drilling has returned a series of high-grade results, which it said highlights the potential for it to become the company’s second major production project.
The drilling was undertaken at the Peake prospect, which is one of Northern Star’s high-priority targets at the Ashburton project where a resource of 668,000-ounces has already has been outlined.
The Ashburton project is within 200 kilometre trucking distance of Northern Star’s Paulsens gold mine.
Northern Star recently announced it is on track to better its calendar 2011 forecasts for Paulsens of 75,000 ounces in production and $40 million in surplus cash.
The Peake prospect is an open pit that was mined in 2001 and produced approximately 89,000 tonnes at 6.54 grams per tonne gold for 18,700 ounces.
The mined ore body has a strike length of 600 metres with true width of two metres to four metres and is hosted within fine to medium-grained sediments.
Before Northern Star’s recent drilling campaign, Peake had undergone very little historic drilling although some limited deeper historical drilling had returned high gold grades with results including 3 metres at 12.9g/t and 6 metres at 10.3g/t.
The latest drilling campaign resulted in a total of 5,209m of RC drilling carried out at Peake.
The results received included highlights of:
– 5 metres at 8.3 grams per tonne gold, including 3 metres at 11.3 grams per tonne gold;
– 11m at 5.2 g/t gold, including 5m at 8.4 g/t gold;
– 8m at 6.5 g/t gold, including 4m at 10.1 g/t gold;
– 8m at 5.3 g/t gold, including 4m at 9.3 g/t gold;
– 6m at 7.2 g/t gold;
– 3m at 7.8 g/t gold; and
– 4m at 6.1 g/t gold.
Northern Star said it considers these intercepts have significantly increased the prospectivity of the Peake prospect and proves mineralisation is continuous along strike.
The company is still waiting on further assays from this first round of drilling, but said it is confident potential exists for further extensions to the mineralisation.
In the company’s announcement to the ASX, Northern Star managing director Bill Beament said the Peake prospect is a prime example of the potential for mineralisation to continue beneath and adjacent to previously mined pits at the Ashburton gold project.
“The Peake prospect offers potential to deliver both oxide and high grade underground sulphide resources which will add to the overall mineral inventory for the company,” Beament said.
“In-under 12 months Northern Star has delivered two corporate transactions, generated substantial profits and is now growing the business organically through successful exploration.”