A furious diamond drilling campaign at its namesake high grade gold project in WA, has seen Bellevue Gold come within just 200,000 ounces of joining the exclusive two million gold ounce club.
The ASX listed company continues to return solid numbers from a busy infill drilling schedule at the Tribune and Viago lodes, where 30,000 metres of a planned 80,000m program have now been completed.
At the Tribune prospect, shallow drilling up to 200m from surface has returned a number of impressive assays, including 9.6m at 14.1 grams/tonne gold from 107.9m, 3m at 33g/t gold from 162m, 1.9m at 29.3g/t from 58m, 5.2m at 5.4g/t gold from 203m and 0.6m at 273.5g/t gold from 155m.
Meanwhile, at the Viago prospect, deeper intercepts such as 0.7m at 78.8g/t gold from 590.4m, 5m at 11.1g/t gold from 606m and 3m at 19.8g/t from 580m have not disappointed.
Bellevue has also allocated additional geological resources to its more recent high grade, New Deacon and Mavis discoveries, with six rigs currently working in tandem on completing step out expansion drilling.
They will target a number of significant, high priority, off hole, electro-magnetic conductors during the remainder of 2019.
The Bellevue project, which is located around 30 kilometres north of Leinster in WA’s Eastern Goldfields region, already has an inferred resource inventory of 1.8 million ounces at an impressive 11.1g/t gold, making it one of the highest grade undeveloped gold discoveries around.
It was previously mined between 1969-1997, producing 800,000 ounces from ore grading 15g/t, proving itself to be one of the most profitable gold mines in Australia.
Although Bellevue Gold had originally sought to find more gold along the faulted extension of the historic gold body, the company subsequently discovered a more complicated, but productive geological setting which has so far yielded most of the known 1.8 million ounce resource.
Within this setting the company is convinced that an extensive system of conjugate faults occur through which gold mineralisation has flowed and multiple ore bodies have formed.
One of these bodies, the Deacon mineralised shear zone, represents the fourth known significant shear zone to host high grade gold mineralisation in the Bellevue lode system.
The others are the Bellevue Shear, which has already produced 700,000 ounces and still has an inferred resource of 700,000 ounces at 9.6/t gold, the Viago Shear, with its current inferred resource of 700,000 ounces at 16.1g/t and the Tribune Shear, where the company has sized up a further inferred resource of 300,000 ounces at 8.1g/t.
All four of these shear zones and lodes are located within 400m of the historic Bellevue mine’s underground development and have a similar strike length.
Bellevue Managing Director Steve Parsons said:"Around 35% of the infill drill program has now been completed and we anticipate making significant progress by the end of the first quarter in 2010.”
“The company has also sourced a further two diamond core rigs to operate through until the end of 2019 to allow the assessment of what looks like a very large and significant target at the Deacon and Mavis Lodes discovery.”
“We now have six drill rigs operating over 1.8km of strike on this new discovery, taking the total rigs to eight on site.”
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By Matt Birney
