Red Mountain confirms second Philippine gold system
THE DRILL SERGEANT: Red Mountain Mining (ASX: RMX) has received drilling results it claims to have confirmed a second high-grade gold system within the company’s Batangas gold project located 50 kilometres south of Manila in the Philippines.
The first hole of a planned 10-hole diamond drilling program at the West Drift epithermal lode structure at the Lobo prospect within Batangas, has returned an intersection of:
– 8.6 metres at 2.53 grams per tonne gold from 136.6 metres depth downhole including 0.85 metres at 5.59 grams per tonne gold and 1 metre at 4.62 grams per tonne gold.
The new intersection is from an initial drilling being conducted by Red Mountain at West Drift to target high-grade gold mineralisation below the old Lobo copper mine and potentially convert the gold mineralisation to resource inventory.
A second hole has also intersected a strongly mineralised quartz/barite lode structure over a downhole thickness of 10m from 147.45m depth.
Plan of Lobo epithermal gold structures. Source: Company announcement
“The result from the first hole in Red Mountain’s initial drilling program at Lobo is very encouraging and highlights the under explored nature of the Batangas gold project,” Red Mountain executive chairman and acting CEO Neil Warburton said in the company’s announcement to the Australian Securities Exchange.
“An additional drilling rig will be commissioned to commence in the second week of January to fast track the drilling program at West Drift.
“If successful this program has the potential to increase the known Lobo gold resources significantly as the West Drift target area is at least four times larger than the existing South West Breccia resource area immediately to its south.”
Previous drilling has only tested approximately a 500 metre strike length of the interpreted 10 kilometres strike length of mapped lode structures at Lobo, to shallow depth of less than 150 metres.
High-grade gold shoots have been identified at South West Breccia, which boasts an Indicated Resource of 270,000 tonnes at 6.49g/t gold for 56,380 ounces of gold and an Inferred Resource of 61,000 tonnes at 5.35g/t gold for 10,540 ounces of gold.
High-grade shoots have now been identified at the West Drift prospect.
Drilling by previous owners at West Drift indicated a target zone of greater than 400m strike length, with generally increasing gold-grade with depth.