Miramar has made significant strides proving up its gold projects since listing on the ASX in October 2020 and is keeping this momentum going into 2022 with an expansion into other commodities.

The company’s efforts over the past months since listing have been focused on its Gidji joint venture and Glandore project near Kalgoorlie in Western Australia’s Eastern Goldfields region, both of which have seen some very intriguing gold results.

It has also picked up the Bangemall nickel-copper-platinum group element project and outlined two large iron oxide copper gold (IOCG) targets at its Whaleshark project, both located in the Gascoyne region.

So just what is it about its projects that has Miramar Resources (ASX:M2R) looking forward to 2022?

Gold projects

The Gidji JV project (Miramar 80%) is located just 14km north of Kalgoorlie within the Boorara Shear Zone, a major regional structure, and along strike from large gold deposits.

It has been well covered by historical drilling and auger sampling though most holes are less than 60m deep.

Aircore drilling by Miramar has outlined several new targets including Marylebone, a potential lookalike of the 4 million oz Paddington deposit just 10km along strike to the northwest.

Miramar resources gidji
Miramar’s Gidji project. Pic: Supplied

Marylebone has a footprint of at least 2km long that remains open to the northwest with multiple drill results exceeding 2 grams per tonne (g/t) that outlined geology, structure and scale remarkably similar to Paddington while remaining virtually untested at depths greater than 60m.

Aircore drilling has also defined “The Jog”, Lake, Claypan, Railway and Piccadilly targets at the project.

A 10,000m aircore program is currently underway to extend and infill the Marylebone prospect ahead of bedrock drill testing next year.

Over at the 42sqkm Glandore project, about 40km east of Kalgoorlie, lake drilling identified  a very large gold footprint with multiple aircore holes returning more than 0.25g/t gold and outlining shallow supergene gold anomalism over almost 5km of strike.

Exploration has also outlined multiple new targets including a potential Majestic (0.48Moz) lookalike.

Historical work has been limited to the western part of the project and has been sporadic since the late 1980s.

Looking beyond gold

While gold is the mainstay for Miramar, it is certainly not the only element that the company is hunting for.

The company also holds the Bangemall and Whaleshark projects in the Gascoyne region, which is well known for hosting large gold, copper and nickel-copper-PGE deposits such as Tropicana, Telfer and Nebo-Babel.

Bangemall covers a major crustal-scale structure at the contact between the Yilgarn and Pilbara cratons that has been highlighted as having high prospectivity for Proterozoic craton-margin nickel-copper-PGE mineralisation.

A review of historical data has also identified the Dooley Downs and Mt Vernon prospects while applications for additional tenements are awaiting grants.

More recently, at its Whaleshark project, the company used geochemical sampling to outline two large areas of coincident copper-uranium-rare earth elements (REE) anomalism, which is strongly suggestive of buried IOCG mineralisation.

This suite of elements is also similar to those observed at the recently discovered Havieron gold-copper deposit, which has a contained resource of 3.4 million oz of gold and 160,000t of copper.

Additionally, there is only about 100m of cover in the area compared with 500m to 800m in places like the Paterson Orogen and the Stuart Shelf in South Australia.

This makes it relatively easy to drill test and potentially mine these targets.

Positive gold outlook driving exploration

Speaking to Stockhead, executive chairman Allan Kelly said the outlook for gold in 2022 is positive and promising.

“Analysts predict gold could rally towards US$1,900 an ounce during the first half of the year as markets focus on economic growth and recovery, inflation and global political situations,” he noted.

“Economists are concerned about inflation rate rises and investing in gold is a historically ‘inflation-protection’ strategy. Gold mining stocks will trend up on the back of an increase in gold price so gold miners will be looking at that with anticipation.”

He added that there’s upside across all of the company’s projects with Gidji and Glandore remaining the top priorities as the potential for new gold discoveries becomes greater with deeper drilling.

Looking ahead, the company plans to carry out further aircore drilling across the Gidji project along with RC and/or diamond drilling at Marylebone.

Follow-up aircore and diamond drilling will also be carried out at the Glandore project while Bangemall and Whaleshark will be subject to further target generation for testing in 2022.

 

 

This article was developed in collaboration with Miramar Resources, 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.