Special Report: In late June, cashed up WA explorer Golden State Mining will kick off maiden drilling at Yule South, 13km from De Grey’s regionally defining Hemi gold discovery.
In May, a heavily bid $2.2m placement to fund Golden State’s (ASX:GSM) expanded drilling program in the red hot Mallina gold province closed oversubscribed.
A week later, the explorer was awarded an extra $150,000 from the WA government’s Exploration Incentive Scheme (EIS) to go toward drilling costs.
This funding is a third-party vote of confidence, not only in the area, but in the five main targets Golden State has selected, managing director Mike Moore says.
“We are in an area where there isn’t a lot of [geological] knowledge, and there is a broader benefit to increasing that level of knowledge,” he says.
“In terms of actual drilling cost, it’s probably half the cost of the program; a very handy amount of money that we don’t need to spend ourselves.
“It’s nice to have [the WA government] look through our submissions and deem it worthy of the funding.”
De Grey’s (ASX:DEG) Hemi discovery represents something very new and exciting for this region.
Hemi is already looking like it will be a multi-million-ounce deposit.
“We are looking for certain things, similar looking targets in the geophysics to Hemi,” he says.
“We are also looking for intrusives and good structure – and these targets tick those boxes.”
Golden State’s initial +10,000m, 30-40m deep aircore drilling program is looking for the ‘interface’ between the transported sand cover and the bedrock. It’s essentially a geochemical sampling program, Moore says.
“The transported sand cover — which has traditionally ‘masked’ potential discoveries like Hemi — has stymied gold explorers in the past,” he says.
Where there isn’t a lot of cover an explorer can usually just take samples from surface.
“But because there is a lot of ‘transported’ sand cover you can’t rely on surface samples to give you an accurate indication of what is below,” he says.
“The aircore drilling will get down to that interface where we will hopefully find the ‘signature’ of something big lurking beneath in the hard rock.”
Golden State is replicating De Grey’s Hemi discovery model, which involves a more tightly spaced 640m by 80m drill pattern.
“We now understand what sort of footprint a discovery may have, so we have aligned our drilling to hopefully hit something with a similar sort of footprint,” Moore says.