Westgold Resources (ASX:WGX) has confirmed sediment hosted coarse gold mineralisation within the Western Flanks orebody at the Beta Hunt Mine in Western Australia.
The $2.62 billion market capitalised company says these coarse gold occurrences provide “significant” production upside potential.
“Westgold sees a much larger opportunity at Beta Hunt and across our Southern Goldfields asset, with drilling the catalyst to define their real scale,” says CEO Wayne Bramwell.
The gold zone includes the Father’s Day Vein (FDV) occurrence, which was discovered in 2018 and produced in excess of 30,000 ounces of gold. The FDV had not been captured in the A Zone geological or resource estimation model at that time.
Drilling in 2019 intersected sediment associated, coarse gold in two holes, with assay results comprising 2m @ 1,017.3 grams per tonne (g/t) gold, including 0.27m @ 7,621g/t gold.
Westgold says the results highlight the potential for Western Flanks to also host the same style of coarse gold mineralisation as mined from the FDV within A Zone.
“The confirmation of this style of mineralisation within the Western Flanks deposit not only provides increased production upside, it also indicates the potential for additional bonanza grade zones within other mineralised structures such as the Fletcher Zone,” Bramwell says.
In the first quarter of the 2025 Financial Year (FY25), the mining schedule allowed for stoping of the area hosting the coast gold intersections identified in the 2019 drilling.
The company adds that by analogy to A Zone and Western Flanks, there is an opportunity for the Lunnon Sediment coarse gold mineralisation to occur within the Fletcher Zone, alongside extensions to shear zones in the Beta and Gamma Blocks.
Lunnon Sediment is a regional stratigraphic unit, which lies 150m below the Lunnon Basalt – Kambalda Ultramafic contact.
The unit is likely present over the full Beta Hunt sublead and the confirmation, through mining, that coarse gold is now associated with the Western Flanks shear zone supports the interpretation for coarse gold mineralisation occurring wherever the Lunnon Sediment intersects a mineralised shear zone.
Westgold Resources is an Australian gold producer focused on its assets in the Murchison region and Southern Goldfields.
Write to Aaliyah Rogan at Mining.com.au
Images: Westgold Resources
