Everest piles up WA gold dirt to spit out early cashflow
Thu June 27 2024
Everest Metals has stockpiled 8000 tonnes of high-grade gold ore going as high as 33 grams per tonne at its Revere gold project, 90km north of Meekatharra in Western Australia’s Mid West region, after ramping up its work in a bid to spit out early cashflow.
The news comes hot on the heels of the company revealing plans on Tuesday to spin out its uranium assets to put a sharper focus on its core gold and critical mineral assets.
Since Everest kicked off its drill-and-blast program in April, 96 holes for 1152m have been completed by an air-blast rig, with excavation work expected to be concluded by the middle of next month. The holes have been sampled at 1m intervals as part of grade control and have thrown off plenty of visible gold, with samples hitting some dream grading figures for a gold miner.
The ore has now been stockpiled into high and low-grade mineralised material for processing.
The company says that the results provide evidence of an extensive structure consisting of stacked, folded quartz and saddle reefs along an anticlinal axis. It is on track to deliver on its conceptual estimated exploration target of 334,000 gold ounces.
Last year, Everest delineated 7km of reef system with gold mineralisation from surface to a depth of 130m using historic drill results and geological surveys.
The company has planned the current program with an eye to confirming the bulk grade of the gold reef systems. The location of the pits are designed to provide geometallurgical variability data and geological assumptions, in addition to identifying the extent of the mineralisation in just a small section of the Revere Reef.
Metallurgical testing to date has confirmed recoveries of 88 per cent from a coarse liberated gold that is suitable for concentration processing using a modular “Gekko” mobile crushing and gravity processing plant.
Revere was originally brought to the company’s attention after 8845m of historical drilling at the site found high-grade gold running at between 0.1g/t and 28g/t gold in many of the reverse-circulation (RC) drillholes. The results were further complemented by an 80kg sample taken in 2007 that ran more than 1000g/t gold and two bigger 200kg samples taken in 2018 that featured grades of between 18g/t and 357g/t.
Management is expected to apply future bulk sampling grades to the known mineralised quartz reefs for geological continuity and to determine an inferred JORC compliant resource. The entire program should take about six months to complete and Everest then plans to kick off an air-core (AC) drilling campaign to generate additional JORC-compliant resources with near-surface gold potential.
With a fresh and fully-concentrated focus on its gold and critical metals assets, Everest’s hopes are likely to be running high that it can spit out some big early cashflows from its bulk sample processing, before getting its teeth stuck into what could be a company-making gold mine.
Source: https://thewest.com.au/