Metalicity’s Leipold prospect is shallow, high grade and potentially open pittable
Mining
Mining
Special Report: New near-surface, high-grade drill results from Metalicity’s Leipold prospect at its Kookynie gold project has indicated the strong potential for it to be an open pit deposit.
Metalicity (ASX:MCT) reported new hits including 10m at 3.21 grams per tonne (g/t) gold from 26m, 3m at 4.59g/t from 31m and 4m at 3.69g/t from 23m.
At today’s record high gold prices, anything as low as 1-2g/t can be profitable for a miner, especially if it’s close to surface because it lowers the cost of mining even further.
On Wednesday the gold price smashed through the $US1,800 barrier, its highest finish since 2011. The weak Aussie dollar against the greenback means that would fetch Aussie gold miners over $2600 an ounce.
“Importantly these results are very shallow, high grade, which if converted to resources and reserves, could be potentially open pittable,” managing director Jason Livinstone said.
And the mineralisation at Leipold remains open in all directions, meaning Metalicity hasn’t found the edges of this large system yet.
The southernmost hole drilled — which returned 10m at 3.21g/t gold from 26m — has extended the known mineralisation at the Leipold prospect to half a kilometre.
But there is still a further 2.2km of strike to the north and south that remains relatively untested.
Metalicity has also had a high success rate with phase-one drilling.
“Our strike rate of significant gold intersections to date is very high,” Livingstone said.
“Of the 29 drill holes that we have received our assays results for, 21 out of 29 returned a significant intercept which speaks volumes of the endowment here.”
The results for 15 holes drilled at the Leipold and McTavish prospects are still pending and due for release in the coming weeks.
Metalicity says these holes intersected visual quartz veining and alteration over good widths.
Drilling so far has had a success rate of nearly 88 per cent in returning a mineralised intercept, according to Livingstone.
“Therefore, we plan to immediately recommence drilling with our phase-two expanded program to continue to grow the footprint of this exciting project,” he explained.
Drilling will restart shortly to continue to test the known prospects and develop drill targets
within the further 8km of strike extensions.
Results from a recent drone magnetic survey over the Leipold-McTavish, Champion, Cosmopolitan and Altona Trends are due out soon and will further refine new targets for the upcoming drilling program.
The Leipold prospect sits just south of the old open cut mine of the same name.
Several gold explorers, including Metalicity, have had success and made new discoveries around old mines, particularly in Western Australia.
This has piqued investor interest.
In the past three months the company has rocketed over 1000 per cent to around 3c. Earlier this week Metalicity hit a new 52-week high of 4.6c.