Gateway’s got an aggressive exploration plan to accelerate Montague gold growth

Gateway is looking to focus its efforts this year on growing resources at its Montague gold project in Western Australia’s Murchison region by making step-change discoveries.

While the project currently has a resource of 526,000oz below historical open pits that were mined in the 1990s, several new discoveries made in the local area around the Montague Granodiorite intrusion have indicated that the project is significantly underexplored as it is part of a major gold mineralised system with meaningful potential for growth.

Gateway Mining (ASX:GML) is currently conducting a project-wide structural and geochemical compilation and targeting study which seeks to understand key controls and relationships between existing deposits.

The study by industry-leading consultants Model Earth will also be aimed at making major new discoveries within the 1,000km2 tenement package.

“Building on the discovery success and knowledge gained over the past 2-3 years, we are moving into an exciting new phase of exploration activity at Montague in 2023. Part of our efforts will be geared towards continued building of our shallow resource inventory,” managing director Mark Cossom said.

“However, in parallel we will be broadening our approach across the entire 1,000km2 tenement package and undertaking programs aimed at unlocking what we believe to be the significant potential for ‘step-change’ discoveries.

“This potential exists both at depth below existing resources around the Montague Granodiorite Dome as well as further afield along major mineralised corridors within the project.”

He added that the work by Model Earth will be used by the company’s geological team to prioritise its field programs for 2023 with the goal of rapidly accelerating resource growth amidst a favourable outlook for the gold sector.

Work to date and the way forward

Gateway’s exploration to date has made several new discoveries in the 5km radius around historical open pit mining activities, which led to the delineation of the current 526,000oz contained gold resource.

More importantly, this work has demonstrated the large gold system that exists around the Montague Granodiorite.

Further exploration will be aimed at making further shallow oxide discoveries within this 5km radius to build a critical mass of shallow oxide zone Resources in excess of 800,000oz to allow for an evaluation of the project’s economic potential.

New targets will be generated in the highly prospective, under-explored regions of the project, where untested historical intersections such as 4m grading 10 grams per tonne (g/t) gold from a down-hole depth of 32m at hole TTR0944 at Montague North and 11m at 4.5g/t gold from 58m in hole 3660/1472 at Montague West are present.

Deeper exploration will target prospective zones below existing Mineral Resources, with geophysical seismic surveys to be used to focus deep diamond drilling.

As part of this broader exploration goal, the company will follow-up on recent reverse circulation drilling at Caledonian and Achilles East, and undertake large-scale geochemical and scout drilling programs to test new targets generated on the broader tenement package.

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.