It’s early days, but former coal hopeful Gateway Mining probably made the right decision to refocus efforts on the Gidgee gold project in WA.

In March 2018 Gateway (ASX:GML) went all in on Gidgee, believing there could be a large-scale mineralising system beneath the underexplored project area.

Historic mining operations produced about 150,000oz of gold from five small, shallow oxide open pit mines in the late 80s. Limited deeper drilling beneath these pits had hit ‘significant’ high-grade primary mineralisation, but was never followed up.

Gateway drilled beneath the historic Whistler and Montague gold deposits, reporting a maiden resource of 240,000oz in October this year.

This was the first step in the company’s strategy to develop a “large-scale gold project”, the company says; a project with multi-million-ounce potential.

A big, 16,000m drilling program recently kicked off to test that theory.

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Consolidating the corridor

Today, Gateway announced that it had secured additional prospective tenements covering a total area of 262sqkm to the north of Gidgee.

Systematic exploration programs will be planned across the new tenement areas as part of the company’s expanded, multi-pronged exploration push.

New tenements in red.

“We have been building our belief that the Gidgee gold project is located within a major mineralised corridor that really hasn’t been viewed in this way previously,” Gateway managing director Peter Langworthy says.

“There has been a lack of a systematic exploration and the fact that the majority of the trend is covered by transported cover means historically the prospectors have not identified any mineralisation.”

Transported cover generally means there’s no geological ‘signposts’ at surface to point the company toward potential mineralised areas.

That’s where good data comes in.

“We have now invested in collecting and re-processing key geophysical, geochemical and drilling datasets, which has resulted in identifying areas we think have a lot of potential in the medium to long term,” Langworthy says.

“The transactions we have completed to consolidate this new ground has been done at low cost, but at the same time provides upside to our new project partners in the event of a significant discovery.”

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