Phillips River exploration tenements granted

THE BOURSE WHISPERER: Phillips River Mining has been granted two new exploration tenements.

The new tenements are located close to existing exploration tenement holdings and planned milling infrastructure of the Phillips River project.

The Phillips River project consists of four mines that contain gold, copper, silver, zinc and lead mineralisation as well as a processing facility that is capable of producing around one million tonnes per annum.

The company is targeting construction in 2012 and production in 2013.

Based on current studies, the company said it expects the Phillips River project to generate in the vicinity of one billion dollars in revenue through gold dore and copper and base metal concentrates sales.

Phillips River Mining is confident that the operating life of the mine will extend well beyond the initial 10 years.

The first of the two new exploration tenements measure 46 square kilometres and is located immediately west of the Trilogy deposit.

It has already been subjected to previous modern exploration which has returned intersections of:

–    9 metres at 0.22 per cent copper from 19 metres, and 7 metres at 0.24 per cent copper from 38 metres to end of hole in RAB drilling.

Neither of these intersections has been followed up with deeper drilling.

A total of 332 RAB holes for 14,384m have been drilled during the previous exploration efforts over the tenement area, which the company considers to be valuable data from which it can to re-launch exploration activities for Trilogy style mineralisation.

The second of the new tenements is 11 square kilometres and is located within the Albany-Fraser Belt, which is considered prospective for Tropicana style mineralisation.

This tenement adds to the company’s existing tenement package of 167,000 hectares of exploration tenements that was granted earlier this year.

“Acquiring these two tenements is part of the company’s strategy to explore for further resources to add to the Phillips River project mine life, “Phillips River Mining managing director Jason Stirbinskis said in the company’s announcement to the Australian Securities Exchange.

“Of particular immediate interest is E74/462 which is very close to the proposed Trilogy plant and we suspect the Trilogy multi element geochemical anomaly is likely to extend in the direction of the new tenement.”