Shaw River hits high-grade manganese at Baramine

THE DRILL SERGEANT: Drilling at the Baramine project of Shaw River Manganese the Pilbara region of Western Australia has returned promising results with grades of up to 46% manganese.

The latest results come from a recently completed a 10,000 metres RC drilling program at Baramine.

Shaw River is confident the results highlight Baramine’s strong potential and intends to proceed with resource estimation, drilling and beneficiation testwork at the project.

The recent drilling has followed up previous results, which identified a corridor of manganese mineralisation known as the Area 3 – Area 4 corridor.

The latest assay results include two intersections of 46% manganese, the highest achieved at the project to date as well as the identification of a coherent zone of manganese at Area 3.

The latest drilling program consisted of 86 holes of RC drilling for 10,308m.

Overall 42 of the 81 holes analysed to date have intersected greater than eight per cent manganese mineralisation.

Area 3 Results include:

– 10m at 31% manganese from 36m, including 1m at 37.2% manganese and 1m at 46.3% manganese;

– 6m at 28.8% manganese from 67m, including 1m at 46.4% manganese, (part of 3m at 39.7% manganese);

– 5m at 22.8% manganese from 46m, including 2m at 30.4% manganese;

– 10m at 15% manganese from 11m, including 4m at 20.1% manganese; and

– 8m at 19.8% manganese from 31m, including 1m at 31.6% manganese.

One of the holes, drilled to a depth of 152m contained an average of 10% manganese over its entire length from surface.

Area 4 results include:

– 10m at 19.3% manganese from 91m, including 2m at 35.3% manganese (part of 6m at 25% manganese); and

– 6m at 18% manganese from 70m.

Following the success of the current program, Shaw River intends to carry out follow up drill programs including diamond drilling for beneficiation test work.

These are being planned to infill and extend the discoveries at Area 3-Area 4.

“The mineralisation intersected to date and trends identified on the surface strongly warrant resource definition and further work on manganese recovery,” Shaw River Resources said in its ASX announcement.

“Earlier work on DMS (Dense Media Separation) indicated the ability of 20% manganese feed material being able to produce a concentrate grading 43% manganese and 10% iron, which would add strongly to the prospects of a future operation at Baramine.”

The copany has identified a number of regional drilling targets and and has ranked these through a re-interpretation of available geophysical and geochemical data including XTEM, gravity, rock chip and trenching data.

Follow up drilling during the 2012 drilling season will include drilling on these targets.