Minerals Commodities hits high-grade nuggetty gold in WA's mid west

Mineral Commodities has struck grades of up to 326 grams per tonne (g/t) while bulk sampling nuggetty gold at its Doolgunna project in the Mid West region of WA.

The company’s (ASX:MRC) shares jumped 5.3 per cent to an intra-day high of 20c on Wednesday morning. The share price has traded between 10c and 30c over the past year.

A 41-hole drilling program testing a 1.5km long section of the project intersected lower than expected gold grades — due to the high distribution of visible gold nuggets, which requires a different sampling method to understand the overall resource.

The nuggety gold look similar to the conglomerate ‘watermelon seed’ nuggets discovered by Artemis Resources (ASX:ARV) and Novo Resources in the Pilbara, but Mineral Commodities told Stockhead that it was reef gold, more akin to what has been traditionally mined in Australia, and that there was “unlikely to be watermelon seeds on our patch”.

Pilbara gold explorers Artemis and Novo have previously proven that WA nuggetty gold needs to be bulk sampled rather than drilled after they found an abundance of gold nuggets at their Purdy’s Reward gold project and had difficulties drilling it.

To further investigate the potential of a high nugget gold distribution, Mineral Commodities (MRC) collected five bulk ore samples from three shallow prospecting pits.

All bulk samples returned highly encouraging gold results, including 95.58 grams of gold from a 293.4kg sample – which equals a gold grade of 325.77g/t.

Anything above 5g/t is considered high-grade.

Mineral Commodities shares (ASX:MRC) over the past year

A follow-up 6000m drilling and trenching (bulk sampling) program is scheduled to kick off in early September to determine the extent of the gold mineralisation.

“These initial bulk sample results and first pass drilling campaign confirm MRC’s belief that the Revere Reef system is a priority target for the discovery of a significant high-grade gold deposit,” executive chairman Mark Caruso said.

“The forthcoming drilling and trenching program will allow MRC to fully investigate the near surface potential of this exciting reef discovery.”

Mineral Commodities has its fingers in several pies, producing mineral sands from its Tormin operation in South Africa and planning the development of its Munglinup graphite project in WA.