Toro Energy’s 100 per cent-owned Dusty nickel project in Western Australia’s Goldfields continues to grow, with the company’s latest assays showing an up-dip extension to the continuous lens of nickel-rich mineralisation, about 160m thick.
Assays from Dimma’s fifth diamond hole showed 2.1m of massive nickel-sulphide grading 1.83 per cent nickel, 0.29 per cent copper and 0.55 grams per tonne platinum and palladium from 147.1m – the shallowest hit so far.
The company says the intersection extends the sub-vertical zone of massive nickel-sulphide mineralisation at Dimma up-dip to 147.1m and suggests mineralisation may be present as a continuous lens from its shallowest intersection to its deepest, which is at 314.7m.
Toro Energy executive chairman Richard Homsany said: “This is yet another outstanding intersection of massive Ni-sulphide at the Dimma Nickel discovery. We believe Dimma has considerable potential with all five drill holes intersecting massive Ni-sulphide to date leaving the discovery open both at depth and along strike, north and south. All four discoveries at the Dusty Nickel Project remain open at depth with Houli Dooley still yet to be tested with a successful follow-up hole, and no drilling yet to be completed between Dimma and Jumping Jack, some 400m away. With all four discoveries along strike over some 2km of the Dusty Komatiite, we believe the Dusty Nickel Project will continue to deliver excellent exploration results as it reveals itself as an asset of considerable value.”
Historic drilling by Toro at Dimma has come back with some good hits. One discovery hole came back with 4.31m at 1.16 per cent nickel, 0.29 per cent copper and 0.386g/t platinum and palladium from 243.33m, while another went 3.13m at 1.42 per cent nickel, 0.17 per cent copper and 0.605g/t platinum and palladium from 314m.
A third hole showed mineralisation twice as thick as pre-drill estimates and went 4.31m at 1.37 per cent nickel, 0.13 per cent copper and 0.539g/t platinum and palladium from 332m downhole, some 15m off section from the other holes.
And a fourth hole showed 4.6m at 1.61 per cent nickel, 0.22 per cent copper and 0.56g/t platinum and palladium from 194.2m, with a shallower section of 9m at 0.79 per cent nickel from 162m, including 3m at 1.09 per cent nickel from 166m.
The company says the mineralisation seen at Dimma is in the same stratigraphic position as the three other nickel-sulphide discoveries on the Dusty nickel project – Jumping Jack, Houli Dooley and Dusty, which are all about 50km east of the east of BHP’s world-class 2.7-million-tonne Mt Keith nickel deposit.
Significantly for Toro, it has only drilled about 4.5km of the 7.5km-long magnetic feature associated with the Dusty komatiite and has already discovered four zones of nickel-sulphide mineralisation, all remaining open at depth.
Dimma is about 400m south/south-east of the Houli Dooley discovery and about 800m south/south-east of the original Dusty discovery, in what is becoming a nicely-defined north-south-trending area of mineralisation, open to the north and south. The company plans to drill the strike extension of the zone between Jumping Jack and Dimma following the relocation of camp facilities.
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By Andrew Duffy
