Special Report: Gateway is building up a substantial exploration pipeline at its Gidgee gold project in WA after geochemical sampling defined at least 12 high-priority targets for drilling.
The sampling at the Montague Dome highlighted the large-scale gold anomalies across a number of geological settings and different levels of transported cover.
Gateway Mining (ASX: GML) says the newly identified anomalies have only been subject to cursory programs in previous exploration and will be incorporated into future drill planning.
Systematic drill testing will be prioritised on these anomalies in conjunction with work at the established advanced targets at Whistler, Montague-Boulder and Achilles.
“The scale and quality of these newly-defined geochemical anomalies continues to highlight the enormous depth and potential of the Gidgee gold project,” managing director Peter Langworthy said.
“We have always believed that an opportunity exists to delineate a Tier-1 scale gold system within our expanded ground position, and these results further strengthen our conviction.
“We are looking forward to testing some of these new priority targets with the next phase of drilling, the major aircore program that is set to kick off later this month.”
Ongoing gold exploration
Gateway has just completed the initial 4,500m reverse circulation drilling program at Gidgee ahead of schedule and is now waiting for assay results.
This program was aimed at following-up previous high-grade gold intersections of 21m at 2.1 grams per tonne (g/t) of gold from 32m and 2m at 24.6g/t gold from 4m.
Planning is now underway for a 10,000m aircore drilling program that is scheduled to begin soon.
This and the initial reverse circulation drilling will help the company refine its exploration strategy and help determine where it will target the rest of its reverse circulation drilling through to the end of this year.
Systematic drilling will also be carried out on the highly prospective northwest margin of the Montague Granodiorite.
An emerging large-scale gold system
Gateway has been consolidating a large land package, which now covers 1,000sqkm, at the southern extension of the Gum Creek Greenstone Belt, a region which has historically produced 1.5 million ounces of gold.
Five shallow open pits were mined at the Gidgee project between 1988 and 1992, producing about 150,000 ounces back when the gold price languished at around $AUD500 per ounce.
The project area includes a ~30km long major gold-bearing structural corridor called the ‘Woodley Domain’, the third major identified gold trend within the belt.
The other two, Eastern Montague Domain (+1moz) and the Central Gidgee Domain (+2Moz), already have significant gold endowments, while Woodley does not.
For Gateway, this highlights the lack of systematic previous exploration at Woodley despite being every bit as prospective as the two established domains.
Historical exploration at Woodley highlighted significant geochemical gold anomalies, while the limited drilling conducted returned intercepts including 40m at 3g/t gold from surface.
This article was developed in collaboration with Gateway 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.