Avanco adds commercial shine by expanding current gold resource
Drill access created inside historic artisanal workings at Contact.
Gold explorer Avanco Resources (ASX: AVB) has updated the market with a significantly improved gold resource at its flagship CentroGold project in Brazil.
Avanco’s CentroGold project is located in Maranhão in northern Brazil, with its tenements spanning 140,000 hectares (1,400 km2), “situated along a highly prospective and under-explored 75 kilometre greenstone trend,” according to the junior explorer.
Following its exploration schedule, Avanco said that a major reason for the circa 30-40% improvement in its endowment at CentroGold, could be put down to the company re-evaluating past exploration activities and “filling in the drilling gaps” that occurred as a result of historically high artisanal mining activity at Avanco’s tenement ground.
Results home improvement
Avanco reported that it had achieved a 37% increase in contained gold ounces, and a 34% increase in gold grade, thereby putting an entirely new complexion to its official resource at CentroGold.
Avanco’s newly-updated Mineral Resource Estimate for its most advanced prospect (Contact) now stands at 8.2 million tonnes at 3.1g/t gold for 811,000 contained ounces of gold. These figures represent an increase of 203% to 509,000 ounces at a grade of 3.6 g/t gold.
In aggregate, the new MRE for CentroGold now stands at 32.8 million tonnes at 2.1 g/t gold, hosting 2.217 million ounces of gold.
Given the significant improvement in its project economics, Avanco says it now has the potential to significantly improve the economics of the pending Scoping Study, which is now “set for completion” and likely to be published in the foreseeable future.
In addition to its 30%+ improvement at Contact, Avanco is also Drilling for Reserve definition at Blanket, a neighbouring prospect with the potential to contain enough gold resources for the prospect to be considered as a separate deposit.
However, this aspect needs further analysis and testing, which Avanco intends to carry out over the coming weeks. The company has confirmed that it has put four drilling rigs into operation and expects reserve drilling to commence at Contact soon.