RNC Minerals (TSX: RNX) has found an estimated 987 oz. gold in 238 kilograms of rock from veins on level 16 of its Beta Hunt gold mine, just 25 metres below its Father’s Day Vein discovery on level 15, which it announced in September 2018.
High-grade gold has been found on three levels — 14, 15 and 16 — in the “A” zone of the mine in Western Australia, and the junior company intends to drive stopes between each level.
“We’ve only done the ore drives. There are still 20 metres between each level that we haven’t mined yet, so if we’re getting 1,000 to 2,000 oz. per level, that suggests we could get anywhere from 5,000 to 10,000 oz. per level, which starts to add up a lot of high-grade ounces pretty quickly,” Mark Selby, RNC Minerals’ president and CEO, tells The Northern Miner.
“The thing that’s amazing is the density of the stuff,” he continues, noting that in the Father’s Day Vein, most of the 20,000 oz. came from just two tonnes of handpicked rock grading 400,000 grams gold per tonne, or 40% gold. “If you jammed it together that’s a dining-room table a metre thick. The 1,000 oz. we pulled out last weekend was grading 120,000 grams gold per tonne, or 12% gold, occupying 70 to 80 litres of volume, which is basically the size of a car’s gas tank.”
The latest discovery at Beta Hunt, which started producing nickel in 2014 and gold in 2015, supports the company’s geological model that says the areas where the mineralized shear zone and sedimentary sulphides intersect could generate Father’s Day Vein-style coarse gold mineralization.
A muck pile at the gold discovery in level 16 at the Beta Hunt mine. Credit: RNC Minerals.
“The rocks are nice, but the key takeaway is that we have a model, in terms of where a district-wide sediment layer intersects our gold shears,” Selby says. “Before we identified the Father’s Day Vein, we first stumbled on it and hit 1,000 oz. on level 14, which led to the development of a model as to how the high-grade coarse gold gets generated. We then hit it again on level 15 [in mid-2018], which led to the 27,000 plus oz. Father’s Day Vein on the same level. Now we have just started on level 16 and found this, so we’re three for three. When you get those kinds of results, it starts to be that you’re not just lucky. It highlights the potential of what the structure can generate in terms of high-grade gold.
“A lot of people thought the Father’s Day Vein was a one-off, but we now have a model that we have tested successfully three times, and have only tested a few hundred metres on one shear, but this thing goes the entire strike length of all of our shears, so we have multiple kilometres of potential targets.”
Selby points out that the company hasn’t followed up yet on a drill hole it reported in January from its Western Flanks shear that returned a 2-metre intercept of 1,017 grams gold per tonne, including 0.3 metre of 7,621 grams gold per tonne in hole 29. “That’s even bigger than the one we’re on right now, so if you have a model that seems to hold, you can get to some pretty big ounces pretty quickly.”
News of the discovery sent RNC Minerals’ shares up 23% — or 9.5¢ — to 51¢, on 8.9 million shares traded. Over the past year, the junior’s shares have traded in a range of 7¢ to $1.18.
Selby notes that the company is trading at less than half the replacement value of the 5 km ramp system at Beta Hunt that sits above the gold shears. The ramp was put in place to mine the nickel and runs from surface down to 1,000 metres’ depth.
The Father’s Day Vein sits at 450 metres, and 150 metres below the ramp.
Beta Hunt’s multiple gold shears contain gold intersections across a 4 km strike length, which are open in multiple directions next to the ramp network.
“The current mining and drilling has only focused on a tiny, tiny, fraction of that,” Selby says.
Now that is what I call a gold mine. Way it should be instead of “invisible gold” and huge haul trucks etc. to make a gram of au.