Aurumin expands Central Sandstone gold project with five new exploration tenements
Junior explorer Aurumin (ASX: AUN) will acquire a further five exploration tenements at its wholly-owned Central Sandstone gold project in Western Australia.
Under the agreement with private vendors, the company will pay a consideration of $130,000 and issue 4.5 million shares at $0.04 each.
The new tenements sit across 60 square kilometres of acreage and contain existing targets with historical workings and mineralisation trends.
They add to Aurumin’s existing landholding and are expected to further solidify its position in the Youanmi Terrane Greenstone Belt.
They extend directly north of the mining leases that hold the 881,000-ounce Central Sandstone resource and will help consolidate the company’s footprint in the region.
Expanding portfolio
The five new tenements join four lightly-explored tenements granted to the company late last year.
One of the four tenements contains the Queen of the Range, Welcome and Phoenix historic mines that were operated in the early 1900s and produced 197 tonnes of ore at 10.58 grams per tonne gold, 376t at 27.45g/t gold and 82t at 5.92g/t gold respectively.
More recent exploration work has confirmed further high-grade gold potential within the mines.
Critical mass the focus
Managing director Brad Valiukas said the new tenements would help position Aurumin for future growth.
“We are focused on generating the critical mass required for production at Central Sandstone,” he said.
“These new tenements are part of our plan to achieve sustainable production and provide more exploration opportunities into the medium-term.”
First-pass campaign
Earlier this month, Aurumin announced it had completed a first-pass drilling campaign at Central Sandstone comprising 38 holes for a total of 3,888 metres at seven open pit targets.
It targeted multiple depositional models as well as porphyry and intrusive-hosted vein, banded iron hosted and structural shear-style hosted mineralisation in mafic and ultramafic units.
All targets were on the Sandstone mining leases within 3km of the processing plant footprint.
Project acquisition
Aurumin acquired the historic Central Sandstone project in early 2022.
It comprises a significant mineral resource, project infrastructure and an expanding tenement footprint where the company aims to support a gold mining operation in the future.
In March, Aurumin attracted $2.5m in a share placement that will remove a convertible note from its books and free up its finances to focus on Sandstone’s development.