Javelin Minerals’ staged testwork program has confirmed the presence of both gravity-recoverable gold and free-milling gold at its Coogee project near Kalgoorlie.
In a promising development from its staged work, the company says its latest results also show that copper can be recovered separately to gold.
Management says gold diagnostic assaying from selected drilling intervals was run in order to determine the gravity gold component via screen fire gold assays, while the investigation on the copper side of the equation was done using diagnostic acid and cyanide leaching stages.
Future drill core samples will now face bottle-roll leach testing in a bid to confirm the expected high-level of free-milling gold. Upcoming diamond drill cores will also be put through their paces with copper flotation testwork.
Javelin Minerals executive director Matthew Blake said: “We are very pleased to see that our first phase of metallurgical testwork has returned excellent gold and copper recoveries from composite RC drill samples at Coogee with considerable gravity recoverable gold. This complements the metallurgical recovery of 96.4 per cent obtained by Ramelius Resources when they mined and processed the Coogee pit in 2013.”
Further testing will continue at the project, which in August last year unveiled a new gold mineral resource estimate of 1.42 million tonnes at 1.07 grams per tonne gold for a total of 49,000 ounces. Those figures were a massive 1400 per cent increase in tonnage and a 350 per cent rise in contained metal from the previous set of numbers released by Ramelius Resources in 2014.
While historical resource investigations were only carried out for gold, Javelin included an inferred copper mineral resource of 568,472 tonnes at above 3000 parts per million copper for more than 2000 tonnes.
Coogee covers an area of about 17 square kilometres, 55km south-east of Kalgoorlie on the north-eastern shore of Lake Lefroy. The project is 16km west of ASX-listed Lefroy Exploration’s Burns copper-gold prospect.
RC drilling programs have so far defined two gold-copper trends north of the Coogee Pit. The company describes the mineralised system as “significant” on the back of the mineralised trend, which it says now extends to a strike length of 1km.
The project lies within the Kalgoorlie Terrane in the southern part of the Eastern Goldfields Province of the Archaean Yilgarn Craton.
Ramelius previously carried out gold mining on the Coogee project in 2013. The gold giant produced 20,400 ounces of gold at an average head grade of 4.7g/t gold from the project’s open pit and left behind valuable site infrastructure.
Javelin says the Coogee deposit has previously been mined using conventional open-cut mining and expects similar methods will be used in the future.
Speaking of futures, it appears it may be a good time to be unearthing more gold with commodity strategists around the globe tipping the precious yellow metal could run to record highs this year, as the traditional safe haven offers a port away from the two-headed storm of recession fears and interest rate hikes.
New York-based Goldman Sachs argues the hike in gold prices during March can be almost entirely put down to an increase in fear-related demand amid the US banking crisis and increasing recession risks.
Closer to home, National Australia Bank noted last week that central bank purchases of gold remain robust. However, despite strong demand, the bank predicted production would fall and cause a greater price squeeze.
Copper prices have also been predicted of late to break through to record highs this year as a rebound in Chinese demand eats into already low stockpiles. The world’s largest private metals trader Trafigura recently argued that with global inventories of the versatile metal dropping to their lowest seasonal level since 2008, a run for the copper bulls was likely as China continues to forge ahead.
With a growing resource in the right neighbourhood and the ability to walk down both sides of the street with the traditional safe haven of gold and the green energy transition commodity du jour of copper, Javelin appear to be ticking all the right boxes as it works up its project.
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By Steve Kaless
