Gold Projects
Gold in the Drummond Basin, Queensland
The Company owns 100% of two very large groups of tenements over the southern part of the Drummond Basin, called Drummond West (2,236 square kilometres) and Drummond East (2,135 square kilometres), as well as the 590 square kilometre Clermont Project located about 100 kilometres south of the Twin Hills Mine.
The Drummond Basin is one of Australia's most prospective areas for large and World Class (see Glossary) epithermal vein and stockwork style gold deposits and for bulk-tonnage disseminated gold deposits. It contains: (i) the Vera-Nancy-Pajingo mining centre that has produced 2.3 million ounces of gold at head grades greater than 7 g/t and at mid-2005 had reserves of 646,000 ounces; (ii) the recently opened Twin Hills Mine (underground resource of 434,000 t at 16.2 g/t); (iii) the dormant Yandan Mine (produced 359,600 ounces from small pits); (iv) the dormant Mt Coolan Mine (produced 265,000 ounces); and (v) the dormant Wirralie Mine (produced 430,000 ounces and has a remaining resource of 548,000 ounces for nearly one million ounces of contained gold). These deposits all occur within the lower, mainly felsic volcanic sequence within the Basin, called the Cycle 1 Volcanics, and which are related to volcanic centres that are largely unexposed at surface. The positions of such deposits, and their relationship to each other, are depicted in the conceptual exploration model devised by Impact (See Below). They illustrate the prospectivity of the Drummond Basin, which has been subject to only modest deep exploration beneath the regolith and other cover rocks.
This conceptual model also shows the position at depth of the recent Yandan Deeps discovery by Straits Resources Limited below and immediately along strike from the open pit deposits at the dormant Yandan Gold Mine. Here, two drill holes about 40 m apart have returned 176 m at 2.4 g/t gold from 211 m (including 27.5 m at 8.1 g/t gold from 301 m), and 194 m at 2.1 g/t gold from 192 m (including 30.5 m at 8.6 g/t gold from 311 m).
These holes were targeted at induced polarisation (IP) chargeability anomalies, and intersected the mineralisation near the base of the Cycle 1 Volcanics, at the contact with the underlying basement Anakie metamorphic rocks.
