More precious than gold: Classic finds its water for flagship Kat Gap project

While not patently obvious, gold processing requires copious amounts of water, so this freshest news for Classic Minerals is the sweetest kind, especially when your flagship prospect is out in West Australia.

It was tears of joy this week at Kat Gap, when the team at Classic’s first exploratory drill hole at its flagship project struck water adjacent to the main haul road and just 1,100m from the processing plant.

A hole in one which will make water pumping operations a relatively simple joy.

Classic Minerals (ASX:CLZ) had targeted a substantial fault zone identified from detailed aeromagnetic data.

This fault zone is a regional structure and – with the success of the first hole – is expected to hold large quantities of ground water.

Further drilling along this structure will be carried out soon to locate additional water supplies once formal approvals have been received while testing of the water quality is currently underway.

The company has already installed the water storage tanks for its production facility.

Large-scale surface gold mines have been known to go through between 60,000 and 100,000 cubic metres of water per day for use in concentrate handling, roasting, gold recovery and general services.

Kat Gap

Kat Gap currently has a resource of 93,000oz of contained gold, a substantial portion of the company’s global resource of 8.24Mt at 1.52g/t for 403,906oz of contained gold.

The company recently produced 6,504 tonnes of gold bearing ore at an average grade of 4.82 g/t for a total of 1,011 ounces of contained gold during bulk sample mining.

Notably, the ore was easily distinguished from the waste material during mining due to the alteration, which when combined with clear footwall and hanging wall contacts, made it easy to extract with minimal dilution.

It was also moderately thicker on the pit floor than predicted by the resource block model, which could translate to a modest increase in gold present.

Classic already has Western Australian state government approval of its Mining Proposal while its modular 30 tonne per hour Gekko plant is already on site, allowing it to progress towards production at the drop of a hat.

This article was developed in collaboration with Classic Minerals, 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.