Hamelin Gold (ASX:HMG) says geochemical results have the potential to open up a series of new target areas across its West Tanami Gold Project in Western Australia.
Managing Director Peter Bewick tells Mining.com.au Hamelin has just completed a program of surface sampling that is a major expansion of the use of the innovative analytical technique to test a broad suite of regional scale targets across the West Tanami.
West Tanami is a ‘belt-scale’ gold project that covers 2,277km2 of a well endowed, emerging gold province that is significantly underexplored, according to Hamelin Gold.
The application of surface sampling techniques within areas of shallow cover is challenging.
Hamelin says the effectiveness of the analytical techniques across the broad variety of regolith conditions means that no single methodology is likely to be effective in all terrains.
Over the past three years, the company has conducted a series of trials and orientation surveys using a variety of surface sampling techniques to determine the most effective technology within the West Tanami Project.
Results from this research indicate that soil sampling and analysis using the CSIRO-developed Ultrafine technology (UFF) provides the most consistent and effective tool to detect gold anomalism within the sand-covered terrains in the West Tanami.
Following the success with the UFF technique along the Sultan fault corridor, Hamelin expanded its surface geochemical program to test the technique across a series of targets within a range of regolith terrains with the West Tanami.
“In total just under 3000 samples were collected across 10 regional scale targets,” Bewick explains.
Earlier this week, Hamelin announced the results of ongoing phase-one drilling at the Sultan West prospect which intersected gold mineralisation along the entire 1,000m strike of the geochemical anomaly.
Results included 2m @ 6.12 grams per tonne (g/t) gold from 52m.
Meanwhile, at Fremlins South, drilling intersected broad zones of gold mineralisation, returning 2m @ 1.4g/t gold from 42m, and 6m @ 0.12g/t gold from 156m.
“Drilling activities are planned to re-commence in October to test the strike extensions of the two major gold systems recently identified in the West Tanami at Fremlins South and Sultan as well as following up high-priority targets generated through our surface sampling programs,” Bewick says.
“Drilling is expected to run through November with assay results from these programs expected to start coming back around mid-late December.”
Bewick adds that depending on the scale and context of the geochemical results, Hamelin hopes to show “a number of opportunities that could really put the company into focus for investors”.
“We are well funded and given this work is relatively low cost, we are in a position to conduct all the planned activities in 2H of 2024 without the need to go to the market for additional funds,” he says.
Hamelin had $4.9 million in cash at the end of the June quarter and secured up to $1.48 million of tax credits for the 2025 financial year after applying for the Australian Government’s Junior Mineral Exploration Incentive.
The West Tanami Project sits within the same structural corridor that hosts Newmont’s (TSX:NGT) +14-million-ounce Callie Gold Deposit in the Northern Territory Tanami region.
The project comprises 100km of strike along the major structural corridor, the Trans-Tanami Structure, that extends through the Tanami region of Western Australia and into the Northern Territory.
Hamelin says the West Tanami Project contains several prospects with large multi-kilometre-scale gold and arsenic anomalous geochemistry in near-surface drilling and untested geophysical anomalies.
Exploration on the project tenements by previous explorers from the early 1990s to 2019 has shown similar styles of gold mineralisation to the known economic mineralisation in the district, including the Callie gold deposit.
Write to Angela East at Mining.com.au
Images: Hamelin Gold
