Western Gold Resources (ASX:WGR) is aiming to advance towards production at its Gold Duke Project in Western Australia after securing approvals for up to 23,000m of drilling.
The approved drilling campaign will focus on increasing the resource estimate confidence across the Eagle, Emu, Gold King, and Golden Monarch deposits, sterilise approved mining waste dumps and related infrastructure areas, as well as grade control for planned initial mining areas.
Western Gold adds that the drilling will also explore for high-grade mineralisation at the Bottom Camp and Brilliant prospects.
Managing Director Warren Thorne says upon final heritage clearance, the company plans to kick off drilling across four deposits that are currently part of a Scoping Study.
“Drilling at the Brilliant and Bottom Camp prospects intends to explore geochemical anomalies, as well as extending on the known mineralisation,” Thorne says.
“The drilling will form the basis for future mining approvals and provide Western Gold Resources with greater scope to develop the project towards mining.”
Western Gold expects to complete its production Scoping Study shortly, which will be based on the current resource estimate of 4.57 million tonnes @ 2 grams per tonne gold.
The Scoping Study focuses on which strategy provides the maximum financial return, across processing the ore through a mill, carbon-in-leach, and heap leach or a combination of the two methods.
Western Gold notes the first stage production will focus on a portion of the four deposits that contains 178,000 ounces of gold, which is 61% of the Gold Duke Project’s total resource.
Western Gold Resources is a gold-focused explorer that owns the Gold Duke Project, a highly prospective brownfields project, which lies west of Wiluna in Western Australia.
Write to Aaliyah Rogan at Mining.com.au
Images: Western Gold Resources
