West Australian gold company Focus Minerals (ASX: FML) has released a maiden Mineral Resource Estimate for the Euro North deposit and an updated open pit Mineral Resource estimate for the Euro South deposit, both at the company’s 100%-owned Laverton Gold Project.
Highlights:
- Maiden JORC 2012 open pit Mineral Resource for Euro North of 837Kt @ 2.06 g/t for 55.3Koz
- Euro South open pit Mineral Resource rebuilt to 572Kt @ 1.42 g/t for 26Koz, including a 73% increase in the Indicated category
- Combined Euro North-South open pit Mineral Resources of 1.41Mt @ 1.8 g/t for 81.3Koz, an increase of 162%
The updated open pit Mineral Resource position for the Euro deposits, which are separated by only 150m strike, includes targeted drilling completed at Euro North in 2019 and 2021 as well as a detailed review of past drilling.
The Euro South resource model was updated to JORC 2012 standard with a substantial increase in Indicated resources. The Laverton Gold Project (Laverton) covers 362 sq. km of highly prospective tenements, including the historic Lancefield and Chatterbox trend mines, on the outskirts of the Laverton township in the Goldfields region.
Focus’ strategy is to identify sufficient open pit Mineral Resources across the Laverton tenement package to update the Stage 1 Open Pit PFS announced in March 2021.
These increased Mineral Resources at our Laverton Gold Project continue our technical team’s successful campaign which assists the Company’s objective of adding value to Laverton for the benefit of all shareholders. The shallow gold resources at Euro represent an attractive open-pit mining option for inclusion in future economic evaluations,” Executive Chairman, Wanghong Yang, said.
Building out the Laverton Stage 1 resource base
The Euro deposits are located 11km south of Laverton and immediately west of the Focus haul road, which extends from Laverton and south towards Granny Smith. This well-maintained haul road is connected to other deposits on Focus’ tenure by a network of roads including an eastern extension through to the Burtville – Karridale area.
The mineralisation at both Euro deposits is open for further extension and to date Euro South has only been drilled to a depth of approximately 100m. Furthermore, the higher-grade Euro North structure may extend further south and into the footwall of mineralisation at Euro South.
Wanghong Yang said this potential high-value target has not yet been drill-tested. An Ordinary Kriging estimation technique was selected and variograms were modelled in Supervisor. Each domain was estimated separately using only its own sample values. All domain boundaries were considered “hard” boundaries and no drill hole information was used by another domain in the estimation.
