Barton Gold to expand drilling at Tarcoola following promising early results

Buoyed by positive early progress in its latest exploration campaign at the Tarcoola goldfield, Barton Gold (ASX: BGD) (OTCQB: BGDFF) has decided to significantly expand its current drilling activities at the South Australian project.

Barton resumed a 7,000m drilling program at Tarcoola earlier this month and has now elected to expand the campaign by a further 2,000m.

Approximately 5,000m of reverse circulation (RC) drilling has been completed to date in two stages at a number of sites and the company now intends to drill some additional deeper holes in key new regional structural targets.

Parallel workflow trial

“We are making excellent progress of over 200m daily, with some potentially exciting new analytical workflows being trialled in parallel,” managing director Alex Scanlon said.

“Based on this, we are extending our original program to add a third swing and around 2,000m of additional drilling.”

In parallel with drilling, Barton has been trialling in-field applications of Portable PPB’s DetectOre technology for rapid turnaround of preliminary in-field analyses.

Mr Scanlon said Barton is also dispatching key drilling intervals for expedited fire assay analysis.

Multiple targets

Barton commenced the current Tarcoola campaign in May with the aim of testing new structural targets near the historic Perseverance mine.

That initial program completed 3,126m of RC drilling across the School, Old Flame, Perseverance North and Tolmer targets in May and early June.

The company is currently awaiting results from some priority samples sent for expedited analysis.

After a brief hiatus, Barton resumed drilling with a focus on a number of priority targets, including Tolmer, Mulgathing and Warburton.

Perseverance upside

The decision to focus on the Perseverance area came after the company received some very positive results from a target evaluation campaign there.

Assays from recent pit floor drilling at Perseverance returned hits of around 12 grams per tonne gold and confirmed high-grade extensions of mineralisation.

The current campaign at Tarcoola is part of the company’s strategy to potentially commercialise its two historic South Australian gold deposits.

Barton recently engaged highly regarded mining consultancy GR Engineering Services and Mining Associates to undertake detailed scoping studies for the nearby Tunkillia project.

Barton also plans to follow up the study with a review of all technical data to determine the forward work program required to complete a pre-feasibility study.

The commencement of the Tunkillia scoping study comes after the project surpassed 1.5 million ounces earlier this year.