Greenfields explorer Hamelin Gold is hopeful of making the next major discovery in Australia’s elusive Tanami province.
Hamelin’s 3500 square kilometres of ground makes it the dominant landholder on the Western Australian side of the Tanami.
Its ground sits directly along strike from Newmont Corporation’s 20 million ounce Callie mine, part of the world-class Tanami operations.
“It’s odd in an orogenic belt to have such a giant and not a string of 2-5 million ounce deposits within the same province and that’s the sort of scale opportunity we believe that Hamelin Gold has,” managing director Peter Bewick told the RIU Explorers Conference in Fremantle last week.
The reason, Bewick suggested, that another giant had not yet been found, as due to little to no outcrop in the region and extensive sand cover.
“You could hide pretty well anything under there,” he said.
“Given Callie has such a small footprint, we think there’s ample opportunity to hide a few Callies in 3500 square kilometres.”
Bewick says exploration is in Hamelin’s DNA.
Given the difficulty and expense of exploring in the Tanami, Bewick acknowledged the company had to be good at prediction and detection.
“Without going broke drilling holes all over the place,” he added.
The company has turned to technology to assist.
Use of CSIRO’s “groundbreaking” Ultrafine soils technology has already yielded results, identifying two large soil anomalies in the Sultan gold corridor.
Initial drilling returned an “outstanding” 7.6m at 3.2 grams per tonne from 326.2m, including 1.1m at 15.9g/t gold.
“One thing we generated was a beautiful 1km gold anomaly under sand cover with a 700m-long bedrock gold anomaly underneath,” Bewick said.
“We’re super excited to get an RC rig out here.
“This is the sort of footprint that could be sitting over a major gold system.”
However, it’s not the gold potential that caught the eye of the world’s largest miner.
Hamelin drilled a hole into a “rather weird-looking magnetic anomaly” called Hawkeye.
“What we got was not what we expected,” Bewick said.
The hole hit magmatic nickel-copper sulphides.
“It’s the first time this style of mineralisation has been identified in the Tanami,” said Bewick.
It was that result which prompted Hamelin to apply for BHP’s exploration accelerator Xplor.
Last month Hamelin found out it was one of six successful applicants out of a total of 529 companies and prospectors who applied.
As part of the program, Hamelin will receive up to US$500,000 of non-dilutive funding from BHP and receive mentoring and technical support.
There’s also the potential for additional investment and partnerships down the road.
“We’re pretty excited they’re excited,” Bewick said.
“If it’s of interest to BHP, it could be fascinating for our shareholders.”
Hamelin is well-placed for a junior explorer. Aside from the interest from BHP, global major Gold Fields and ASX 200 producer Silver Lake Resources each hold 15% of the company.
Hamelin’s current market capitalisation of A$11.9 million and healthy cash balance of A$5.2 million (at December 31), gives it an enterprise value of just A$6.7 million.
