“It’s a huge anomaly, much bigger than our prospects in the Gawler Craton both in terms of area and intensity,” managing director Peter Alexander said.
RAB drilling undertaken during the June quarter outlined bedrock gold anomalism on every line drilled in an 800m x 100m grid and revealed a strike length of 11km.
At greater than 20 parts per billion gold the anomalous zone is up to 1km wide, but at >50ppb gold a series of discrete zones up to 400m wide are defined, the company said.
Multiple anomalous zones have been identified within a 3km central area with values including 2m grading at 1.0 grams per tonne gold, 6m at 1.12gpt, 1m at 1.57gpt, 3m at 1.0gpt and 3m at 1.31gpt. They are generally bottom of hole intersections.
“We will be undertaking further RAB as well as RC drilling over the next quarter,” Alexander said.
Dominion also has been having good fortune in West Africa. The company now estimates that it is sitting on a 455,000oz gold reserve at its Homasi concession in Ghana.
“We have an extensive zone of low-grade mineralisation with a series of very high grade shoots,” Alexander said.
It is these shoots that are the centre of Dominion’s attention at the moment. Although the low-grade zone could possibly be dug up and the ore trucked 15km to the Ashanti mine for processing, the high-grade shoots could prove to be a real mine maker.
“There is a strong indication that high grade gold mineralisation is developed within a series of northerly plunging shoots. This geometry is typical of the gold mineralisation at the Obusai Mine, 15km to the south, and other geological deposits along this belt,” the company said.
The shoots generally have limited strike length but very extensive down plunge continuity. Although they are limited to a 2km long zone, the wide spacing of drilling outside this zone means there is good potential for locating more ore.
Drilling is planned for the next quarter to test the depth continuity of known high grade shoots.
Back in Australia, Dominion has withdrawn from its agreement with Western Metals on the Hellyer tailings project.
Westmet ceased mining operations at Hellyer in June, but left behind an estimated 1 million oz of gold, 30Moz of silver and 300,000 tonnes of zinc because the refractory nature of the gold and silver thwarted conventional mining techniques.
“We knew about the metallurgical complexities before we got into the project, but thought we had a few tricks to reclaim the gold and silver,” Alexander said.
“Unfortunately, we could not see the returns we wanted, either technically or financially.”
The exercise cost the company about $1.2 million. Dominion currently has about $21.9 million cash at hand.