Novo ends year with gold lining at Pilbara projects

Novo Resources has committed to stepping up its hunt for gold in 2024 within several priority targets at its Egina Gold Camp and Balla Balla projects in Western Australia’s Pilbara region.

The company is awaiting assays from more than 10,500m of drilling at its Becher project and says it gleaned positive shallow results in a maiden reverse-circulation (RC) program at Nunyerry North. It also recently polished off two deep diamond holes at its Belltopper play in Central Victoria.

The Becher and Nunyerry projects lie within Novo’s Egina Gold Camp, centred about 120km south/south-west of the WA Pilbara town of Port Hedland.

They sit in an important structural corridor, which the company says has been a prime focus for its exploration for more than a year. The corridor also hosts De Grey Mining’s bulging Hemi project that has a JORC-compliant estimated 12.7-million-ounce gold resource, just 30km east/north-east of Becher.

Management says that geological factor led to its joint venture (JV) with De Grey, which is earning a 50 per cent interest at Becher, and its definition of the Nunyerry gold prospect. Meanwhile, the company says it is also exploring several other priority gold targets associated with the same structural corridors.

At Becher, drilling undertaken by De Grey saw 271 air-core (AC) drillholes put in over the course of the year for 7536m at the Heckmair/Irvine and Bonetti prospects, in addition to the first 29 holes of an ongoing RC drilling program for 4154m. The comprehensive program has now run through 39,000m of AC, RC and diamond-core work, which will resume in the new year.

At Novo’s new, high-priority Nunyerry North target – which is a JV between Novo (70 per cent) and Creasy Group (30 per cent) – the former says it completed its maiden reconnaissance drilling program comprising 2424m of shallow RC holes through a strike of about 500m to assess several high-grade gold surface anomalies.

Management says the work only covered a small part of the Nunyerry North target area but was successful in defining several quartz vein arrays between northward-dipping shears and exhibiting minor sulphides including pyrite, pyrrhotite and chalcopyrite. It says the signs were sufficiently encouraging to warrant further evaluation in the New Year, which would also assess the prospective stratigraphy trending towards the east and also southward-faulted repetitions of the same trend on the western side of the north-east trending Aurora fault.

At Novo’s extensive 100 per cent-owned Balla Balla group of tenements, centred about 50km north-west of Becher and arrayed parallel to the coastline over a distance of about 100km, the company says it is focussed on the important regional-scale Sholl shear and its associated prospective structures.

Its tenements enclose an area of more than 1200 square kilometres and straddle the Scholl shear. Initial evaluation throughout the year, through researching historical data and geophysical interpretation, points to the massive zone as being prospective for intrusive and structurally-related gold mineralisation beneath surface cover along particular fertile corridors related to the shear.

Novo says it has identified several target areas of interest and plans to continue work on them in the New Year.

In Victoria, Novo has put in its first two deep diamond drillholes in  a planned program of six holes for a total of 2300m at its 100 per cent-owned 22sq km Belltopper project in the regional-scale Bendigo Zone.

The Bendigo Zone is a key subdivision of Victorian geology and is part of the Palaeozoic Lachlan Fold Belt of eastern Australia.

It is a zone about 100km to 120km wide, sandwiched between the west-dipping, north-to-south-oriented Avoca and Heathcote thrust faults. It is composed of a thick pile of Cambrian to Ordovician quartz-mica turbiditic rocks between 490 and 440 million years old that were deposited into a deep marine environment along the early eastern edge of the Australian craton.

This major fold belt has an orogenic history stretching from the Cambrian to the Carboniferous, which includes arc-continent collision, marine and non-marine sedimentation, folding and faulting, volcanism and igneous intrusion and regional metamorphism. It has sometimes been described as the biggest “slate belt” goldfield in the world.

Cambrian volcanism and sedimentation are regionally significant in that they are the oldest rocks in the zone. But while they do not outcrop in the Bendigo region, their presence at depth is a key factor in the evolution of the historic Bendigo goldfield.

The Bendio Zone contains the globally and historically-significant Victorian gold camps of Bendigo, Ballarat, Fosterville and Costerfield.

Novo is plainly on a roll with plenty of strong targets, sound exploration concepts, good tenement coverage and rock-solid JV partners. It will be interesting to see what its much-anticipated results bring early in the New Year and how the follow-up work pans out.

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