Stonewall Resources eyes road to production after PMR sampling review
THE DRILL SERGEANT: Stonewall Resources (ASX: SWJ) has completed a review of results from a bulk sampling program at the Beta South and Ponieskrantz mines, located within the company’s Pre-Mined Residue (PMR) project in South Africa.
The sampling programs were conducted between late 2014 and early 2015.
Stonewall Resources said the review had reaffirmed its plans to accelerate the re-launch of gold production at the Pre-Mined Residue project as it had confirmed the initial indications of gold bearing material in the historical mines, which was as announced back in July 2013.
“Stonewall is focused on bringing our PMR project in South Africa into production within the next 12 months,” Stonewall Resources director Richie Yang said in the company’s announcement to the Australian Securities Exchange.
“The sampling results confirm the gold mineralisation to be in line with our expectations, and a target delineation sampling program across the PMR exploration targets will commence immediately.”
Stonewall cited an Initial Sampling Campaign in the Beta South Mine from 2013, which indicated the PMR material carried potentially economical grades, providing 62 channel samples that yielded an average grade of 2.334 grams per tonne gold in the minus 10mm fraction, which made up 53 per cent of the mass sampled.
A Second Sampling Campaign for the PMR was executed in late 2014, prior to a trial mining section in Beta South Mine in March 2015, covering areas of the Beta South (352 channel samples) and Ponieskrantz (421 channel samples) mines.
Stonewall said results from this work re-enforced the commercial potential of the PMR project.
In the Beta South mine, the full size fractions were analysed for a total of 177 out of the 352 samples to provide an average grade of 2g/t gold for the minus 17 mm material.
Subsequent results from Ponieskrantz Mine (South) returned average grades of 2.86g/t gold for minus 17mm materials.
Stonewall declared the results to provide confidence for the company’s current project plan to screen all the mined PMR material to produce a minus 17 mm size fraction for processing through a central processing plant.
In late 2015 Stonewall initiated a review of the PMR project study with a revised strategy of risk reduction and a view to improve the economics of the project, during which the company gathered and reviewed sampling data, collecting sufficient detail to plan a target delineation program prior to mining.
The program will be focused on the PMR in mines where the company plans to initially commence mining, including Beta South and Dukes mines in close proximity to the CIL plant.
Website: www.stonewallresources.com