Petratherm (ASX:PTR) has begun resource drilling at the Rosewood Titanium Project in northern Gawler Craton of South Australia to produce a maiden JORC-compliant resource for the project.
The program comprises an initial 400 aircore drillholes over 8,000m for each hole to have an average depth of 20m and spaced from 200m by 500m to 100m by 200m at the Rosewood East prospect.
Drilling will cover a 40km2 area to deliver both an indicated and inferred level resource, scheduled to be completed by the end of the year and assays to follow.
Petratherm intends to ship weekly batches of assays to Diamantia Laboratories in Perth to analyse heavy minerals concentration.
Previous exploration at the project has defined two heavy mineral sands (HMS) zones across a 22km2 area, returning at least 10m @ greater than 5% heavy minerals with a majority of the area returning grades greater than 8% heavy minerals.
Titanium-rich mineralisation is expected to run flat at a shallow depth of around 5-7m, indicating up to 95% valuable heavy mineral content.
CEO Peter Reid says the company’s exploration efforts over the last 12 months have confirmed the Rosewood Project to be a “major high-grade HMS discovery”.
“Given our high level of confidence in the potential of Rosewood, we have elected to undertake additional infill drilling to get a significant portion of the prospect up to the indicated resource category,” Reid says.
“In parallel, we are accelerating the long lead time baseline environmental assessment work to be managed by leading South Australian Environmental Advisors Erias Group.”
Environmental assessments are currently underway for future mining lease applications.
As reported by Mining.com.au, the company intends to conduct four phases of drilling across the greater project, including focus on the Echo prospect and nearby saprolitic targets.
Petratherm is a mineral explorer focused on revealing titanium-rich HMS discoveries in South Australia.
Write to Maddison Elliott at Mining.com.au
Images: Petratherm
