The exploration success story of the year aims bigger in 2021

Special Report: De Grey (ASX:DEG) is the standout small cap exploration success story of 2020. In 2021, it will begin the hunt for Hemi ‘lookalikes’ across its underexplored Mallina gold project in the Pilbara.

Over the past 12 months, De Grey’s near sole focus has been on extending and defining the mammoth Hemi gold discovery with an incredible ~250,000m of drilling.

As Hemi grew so did De Grey’s share price, from 3.9c in December 2019 to over $1.15 currently.

That’s a gain of more than ~2,800 per cent.

De Grey has now defined four main zones at Hemi – Aquila, Brolga, Crow, Falcon – over a large 3.5sqkm area to depths of up to 400m.

Highlight intercepts so far include 64m at 13.4g/t gold from 141m, including 19m at 42g/t.

That’s huge.

And yet after all this drilling these zones remain ‘open’ along strike and at depth, which means De Grey doesn’t know where the gold ends yet.

Eight rigs are currently spinning to support maiden resource for Hemi in the first half of 2021.

Hemi is a big deal: a brand-new type of gold discovery which has transformed the company and the entire Pilbara Craton.

Why? The 8moz Pilbara Craton has only been explored for gold for the past ~20 years.

And yet Hemi sits in the same rocks as the +120-year-old, 200moz Yilgarn gold mining province further south.

This could be the Yilgarn a century ago, in other words.

Countless explorers have poured into the region to try and replicate De Grey’s success, believing there are many more ‘Hemi-like’ discoveries to be made here.

De Grey believes the same thing. It says exploration activity in new areas outside Hemi will increase in 2021.

De Gray — The Greater Hemi project area. Pic: Company Supplied.

Shallow, early stage drilling of the known ‘intrusions’ in the Greater Hemi area is advancing, with prospective targets to be followed up by deeper drilling into the first half of 2021.

More than 200km of shear zones also exist across the wider Mallina project, with the majority of the current mineral resource of 37.4 million tonnes grading 1.8g/t gold for 2.2 million ounces — which excludes Hemi —found in shear-hosted deposits.

RC and diamond drilling to extend existing shear-hosted deposits will fire up again during 2021.

The area around Hemi. Pic: Company Supplied

“Following a recruitment phase, we are now appropriately resourced to lift our exploration gaze to the Greater Hemi area, where we have two aircore rigs and one RC rig drilling both intrusion and structural targets,” De Grey managing director Glenn Jardine says.

“We are continuing to look at resourcing the company to reinvigorate exploration across the whole tenement package during 2021 where we are blessed with many targets.

“We will use the knowledge that we have gained at Hemi over the past year to leverage exploration success across our district scale tenement package.”

This article was developed in collaboration with DEG, 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.