Wiluna Mining Corporation Limited (ASX: WMC) has obtained bonanza grade assays from resource development drilling at the Happy Jack and East Lode zones within the Wiluna Mining Centre in Western Australia.
Happy Jack and East Lode are initial mining areas in the company’s sulphide development plan, where redevelopment of the underground operation is already well advanced ahead of imminent production.
The programme aims to infill Inferred Resource areas with a view to upgrading geological confidence to Indicated or Measured category and converting these areas to reserves. The programme is also expected to increase the resource grade, with demonstrated high grades at good mining widths intersected beyond the current resource limits.
The company said multiple bonanza high grades with abundant coarse gold drilled at the Happy Jack zone, reinforces Wiluna as a high-grade gold system.
Highlights: 1.99m @298.8g/t; including 0.76m @ 773.0g/t; 8.67m @ 18.44g/t; including 4.01m @ 36.28g/t; and 0.72m @ 35.10g/t, 20.00m @ 7.33g/t; including 2.22m @ 30.26g/t; and 4.00m @ 5.27g/t, 4.75m @ 11.81g/t; including 0.85m @ 59.40g/t, 4.90m @ 13.30g/t, 6.82m @ 9.37g/t including 0.69m @ 81.00g/t, 6.62m @ 3.47g/t; including 2.09m @ 9.41g/t, 5.55m @ 7.09g/t
East Lode also returns thick high-grade intercepts over broad areas: 14.90m @ 8.60g/t; and 10.20m @ 4.42g/t; including 6.95m @ 5.06g/t, 14.30m @ 3.86g/t; including 8.52m @ 5.71g/t, 11.24m @ 4.60g/t ;including 2.10m @ 6.85g/t and 3.13m @ 6.24g/t, 13.40m @ 4.26g/t; including 0.73m @ 11.07g/t; and 4.77m @ 6.88g/t.
The current high-grade resource at the Wiluna Mining Centre, above a 2.5 g/t cut-off, is 26.9Mt @ 4.89 g/t and the historic mined grade was considerably higher at 7 g/t to 11 g/t depending on the ore zone.
It is considered that with results like these, the mined grade will increase when stoping commences in previously unmined areas in the September quarter this year. Increasing the mined grade at Wiluna is extremely important because every 1 g/t increase in grade adds an additional 25kozpa to production in Stage 1, increasing to an additional 50kozpa in Stage 2.
These results are from an additional 34 holes and 8,812m of resource development drilling, part of the company’s 100,000m programme of RC and core drilling completed since the last Mineral Resource Estimate.
Currently multiple rigs are drilling to further infill and grow the large-scale, high-grade gold system at Wiluna, with the intention to update the Mineral Resource and Ore Reserve estimates as part of the Company’s inprogress Stage 2 Feasibility Study.
The company’s goal is to build a 2.5Moz Measured and Indicated Resource to enhance mine planning and long-term option studies. The Wiluna Measured and Indicated Resource is already 2.14Moz @ 5.26g/t (above 2.5g/t cut-off).
Including historical production of over 4Moz, Wiluna’s gold endowment defined to date is over 10Moz which ranks Wiluna alongside an exclusive peer group of large-scale, long-life mining centres in the Western Australian gold fields.
For comparison, Wiluna is geologically like the high-grade Fosterville deposit (Kirkland Lake Gold Inc). Most historical production and existing resources occur in the upper 600m at Wiluna, with limited drilling during the past 15 years at depth on Wiluna Mining’s exploration targets which Wiluna Mining is systematically drilling to reveal the true scale of the Wiluna orebody over the next five years.