Kula Gold’s joint venture (JV) partner Australian Critical Minerals has wrapped up a 249-hole shallow auger sample campaign at their Rankin Dome project near Southern Cross in Western Australia’s Wheatbelt region.
The auger program was completed through a 100m-by-100m grid in the north-west area of the operation where a rare earths anomaly was previously recorded. Auger samples are currently at the laboratory, with assay results expected in due course.
In the meantime, Australian Critical Minerals has kicked off a 900m reverse-circulation (RC) campaign, also in the north-west area of Rankin Dome, to test for rare earths.
Kula Gold revealed in June this year that it was joining forces with Australian Critical Minerals, ahead of the latter’s launch onto the ASX boards the following month.
Australian Critical Minerals has six projects spanning 1861 square kilometres in WA’s Pilbara and Goldfields regions. As part of the JV agreement, it will spend $200,000 to help fund 2000m of RC drilling within two years to earn a 51 per cent interest in Kula’s Rankin Dome project.
We extend our sincere gratitude to Stark Drilling for their exceptional support in facilitating our decision to mobilise drilling resources in the most efficient and cost-effective manner. Our primary objective continues to be the swift completion of our drill program at the Kirup Lithium Project. However, we are also closely monitoring the progress made by ACM at the Rankin Dome Project, as it has piqued our keen interest. Kula Gold chief executive officer Ric Dawson
Augur samples collected by Kula in July last year returned encouraging rare earths numbers grading up to 1080 parts per million. It says its heavy rare earths enrichment results were more than eight times the average granite crustal abundance calculated by the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy.
Assays were obtained by pulverising whole rock samples and the company argues it can be considered a true representation of in-ground rare earths values as larger size fraction material has not been sieved out.
Meanwhile, Kula continues to focus its attention on its Kirup project in WA’s South West region. Just last week, it hit wide intersections of pegmatites in a maiden hole at its Mustang prospect, 20km west of Talison Lithium’s Greenbushes mine – one of the world’s biggest hard-rock lithium operations.
Mustang is one of many prospects within the company’s Kirup lithium project where previous assays from rock-chip samples have provided indications of wide, multi-bodied and locally-fractionated pegmatite systems that have the potential to host lithium mineralisation.
Kirup covers 117sq km and sits about 20km to the west of the world-class Greenbushes mine, which is a structurally controlled lithium-caesium-tantalum (LCT) pegmatite of Archaean age.
It complements Kula’s other lithium project Brunswick, which is 20km to the north, and both projects are within greenstone terranes in the south-west of the Yilgarn Craton.
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