St. Jude intersects more gold at Goulagou

Vancouver — West African gold explorer St. Jude Resources (SJD) is making great strides in firming up and extending gold mineralization on its Goulagou/Rounga project in Burkina Faso in West Africa. Meanwhile, recent metallurgical results bode well for open pit heap leach processing at the deposit.

"We are drilling off an economic reserve that we can process cheaply by way of a heap leach plant", says company President, Michael Terrell.

The Goulagou/Rounga prospecting licence encompasses 487 sq. km in the north central region of Burkina Faso. Situated 100 km west of the capital, Ouagadougou, the property was previously worked by Channel Resources (CHU-V) in partnership with Placer Dome (PDG-T).In 1999, Channel estimated what is now considered a historical resource of 774,700 oz. gold in the GG1, GG2, Rounga and Sobona North zones, based on 22,869 metres of drilling in 421 holes. St. Jude, which has been working the project for two years, is finding good correlation between its results and those of Channel.

St. Jude’s current infill and exploratory drilling is geared toward gathering enough data to enable a NI43-101-compliant independent resource calculation.

The latest core drilling, mostly as step-out holes into the northwest trending GG2 zone extended the boundaries of the oxide deposit down-dip and along strike. The deposit has now been defined over 1.7 km, the same length as the subparallel GG1 zone. The oxide-sulphide transition occurs at an average 100-metre depth.

Each hole intersected significant mineralization with the best intercepts including 2.75 grams gold per tonne over 36 metres in hole 169, starting from a downhole depth of 64 metres, and including 8 metres of 8.2 grams; 16 metres grading 3.44 grams gold from a depth of 113 metres in hole 170; and 30 metres averaging 2.43 grams gold from a depth of 111 metres in hole 173.

Plans call for fast-tracking the project to the prefeasibility and feasibility stages once the final metallurgical report and results from current drilling are in.

Ongoing metallurgical testing has resulted in gold recoveries averaging over 85% after 43 days with 95% of the final recoveries leaching out of the samples within 15 days.