10 Mar Grade is king and Wiluna’s ‘Golden Age’ has it in spades
Republished from Stockhead.com.au
Exceptional high grade gold intersections at the ‘Golden Age zone’ could greatly improve the grade at Wiluna’s current mining operations.
New drilling intersections include:
4.26m grading 47.94 grams per tonne (g/t) gold from 100.74m,
5.96m at 18.62g/t gold from 108.04m, and
7.55m at 13.4g/t gold from 127.45m.
Results like this are expected to materially improve free milling production over the coming months.
This is great news for Wiluna Mining (ASX:WMX) given that the Golden Age zone currently supplements the baseload free‐milling feed from Williamson pit stockpiles, and is an important source of transitional cashflow for the next 12 months and beyond.
It is also expected to provide mill feed with the ability to produce gold doré and gold concentrates following commissioning of the sulphide concentrator.
Further extensional drilling is on the cards as the high-grade mineralisation remains open for a considerable distance along strike and down-plunge of the current workings, especially since the latest drilling suggests that the tenor of the mineralisation improves to the east and at depth.
While these extra high-grade intersections alone would be cause for celebration, Wiluna currently has seven rigs carrying out a major resource development and discovery program and has also made high-grade gold hits at the emerging Essex and Starlight shoots as well as the West Lode and Bulletin zones.
More high-grade results
At both the Starlight and Essex shoots, drilling has returned high-grade mineralisation with visible gold, which is expected to enhance the life of mine plan.
Drilling at the new Starlight discovery intersected wide, high grade sulphides topping out at 15m grading 7.23g/t gold from a depth of 52m below the existing pit where oxide and transitional ore was mined out in 2020.
The location of the Starlight shoot just 200m from existing underground mine development activities means that it can brought into production quickly at low capital cost.
Meanwhile, drilling at Essex continues to return excellent results, the latest of which include 2.45m at 31.3g/t gold and 1.13m at 11.03g/t gold.
This validates Wiluna’s strategy of focusing on shallow, high-grade sulphide ore bodies for development early in the mine plan.
Further drilling is planned to complete the infill of this high-grade lode discovery with a view to enhance the front end of the underground mine plan at the Wiluna Mining Centre.
The company also continues to intersect very broad mineralisation such as 106m at 2.41g/t gold from 180m and 82.15m at 1.5g/t gold from 207m at the West Lode South zone.
West Lode South was historically mined via underground between 1932 and 1946, producing 691,000oz of gold an average grade of 8.6g/t gold, demonstrating the scale and high-grade nature of this target zone.
It remains open and sparsely drilled in the southern target area with potential to delineate resource extensions and to make a new shoot discovery.
The existing decline access is now being dewatered to install underground drilling positions.
This article was developed in collaboration with Wiluna Mining, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing.
This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.
Read the article on Stockhead.com.au
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