Barton Gold completes major drilling program at Tarcoola project
Barton Gold (ASX: BGD) (OTCQB: BGDFF) has finalised a drilling program to test multiple targets near the Perseverance open-pit mine at its Tarcoola gold project in South Australia, completing 9,052 metres of reverse circulation work over a 44-day period.
Barton drilled 26 holes into the pit floor in December and April to confirm high-grade extensions of mineralisation grading up to 12 grams per tonne gold as well as new structures below the open pit believed to be analogous to the structure that hosts Perseverance.
Perseverance has a current resource estimate of 20,000 ounces of gold grading approximately 2g/t within 80m of the pit floor.
New targets
Managing director Alex Scanlon said the latest drilling program had proceeded to plan.
“This is our first significant test of new Tarcoola structural targets identified last year,” he said.
“Just one ‘Perseverance repeat’ could be of considerable value to our regional strategy for staged low-cost development and operations.”
Additional holes
Barton completed an additional ten holes for 882m targeting other shallow open-pit mineralisation at Tarcoola with potential for conversion into an expanded open-pit resource estimate.
The work focused on interpreted structural targets near the Perseverance mine in the ‘western targets’ area including Tolmer, Mulgathing and Warburton.
“We have an advantage with the existing fully-permitted Central Gawler mill and believe [these targets are] a high-value opportunity so we are pleased to have quickly followed them up,” Mr Scanlon said.
Tarcoola history
The historic Tarcoola goldfield produced 77,000oz of gold at shallow workings from 1893 to 1955 with an average grade of 37.5g/t.
The small open-pit mine at Perseverance produced ore grading up to 4g/t for two years from 2016.
Relatively little work, however, has since been done to evaluate the goldfield’s architecture or locate prospective ‘repeats’ of shallow, high-grade mineralisation.
Barton has been rapidly growing the neighbouring Tunkillia gold project since 2022 to a mineral resource estimate of 51.3 million tonnes at 0.91g/t for 1.5Moz.
A preliminary scoping study is underway to test a prospective 5Mtpa processing model and to identify key cost drivers for subsequent optimisation.