Westgold Resources has identified five new high-priority drill targets after a successful survey at its Day Dawn mining centre in Western Australia’s Mid West region which hosts its Great Fingall and Golden Crown mines.
The recently completed gravity geophysical survey highlighted the geological faults that control mineralisation at Great Fingall and Golden Crown which together have produced more than 1.6 million gold ounces.
Management says Day Dawn hosts more than 2.2 million gold ounces with greater than 90 per cent of the gold hosted in the Fingall dolerite. The company says it is planning to test the new targets in the first half of this year.
The latest survey at Day Dawn shows the faults that control mineralisation at Great Fingall and Golden Crown can be mapped in the gravity data and were not identified by previous aeromagnetic data, providing a possible additional source of mineralisation.
While in some instances historic gold prospects are known within the target areas, Westgold says these have only been drill tested at shallow depths. Based on the new data, management believes deeper drilling is warranted to target a Golden Crown type scenario of effectively blind mineralisation.
In addition to the new gravity targets, the company is also planning to test a series of known prospect areas at greater depths which are based on Golden Crown analogies where significant high-grade deposits may have only limited surface outcropping.
However, the company says not all currently known reefs within the Fingall dolerite outcrop at surface, while some that do only return modest surface gold assays. The Golden Crown reef outcropped as only a weak quartz vein system with ore grade mineralisation only intersected in drilling at about 120m below surface.
Additional targets selected for deeper drill testing include the Yellow Taxi, 3210, Trenton, Post Office and Bonnie Scotland prospects.
Drilling has successfully extended the mine lives of our key assets during 2023 and allows us to now take a more strategic view of our organic project pipeline. The Fingall Dolerite holds many shallow mines and lacks deep drilling across its 11km strike. With newly acquired data sets yielding blind targets across this fertile belt, our Exploration teams are now prioritising these targets to test during H2, FY24 to find the next Great Fingall.
Westgold Resources managing director Wayne Bramwell
The Day Dawn mining centre sits about 5km south-west of the town of Cue and 28km west of Westgold’s 1.4 million-tonne-per-annum Tuckabianna processing hub.
Last year the company’s board approved the return to operations at Great Fingall after management presented a conservative base case to produce 2.5 million tonnes of ore at about 5g/t gold for 383,000 ounces at an all-in sustaining cost of $1801 per ounce. It is expected to deliver more than 45,000 gold ounces per year once it reaches a steady state of operation, with an initial mine life of eight years and first ore scheduled for the first half of the 2025 financial year.
In May last year, the company unveiled an all-encompassing upgraded mineral resource for Great Fingall of 4.3 million tonnes grading 4.3g/t for 588,000 ounces of gold – a 49 per cent increase to its previous estimate of 304,000 gold ounces.
Combined with the nearby Golden Crown mineral resource of 194,000 gold ounces, the Great Fingall development plan is based on a total resource of 782,000 ounces of contained gold.
With five fresh targets to be tested and a number of deeper prospects on the cards, Westgold’s decision to return to Great Fingall could be a case of the right place at the right time.
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