Barton Gold boosts Tunkillia with new gold and silver resource expansion
Barton Gold (ASX: BGD) (OTCQB: BGDFF) continues to expand its Tunkillia resource, adding significant amounts of gold to the South Australian project with recent drilling.
The recent drilling campaign covering approximately 5,000 metres that Barton completed as part of its optimised scoping study (OSS) program of works at Tunkillia has boosted the gold resource by 120,000oz.
The updated Tunkillia JORC resource has grown to an impressive 1.6 million ounces of gold and the company has now added an inferred silver resource of 3.1Moz as a subset of the gold mineralisation.
Project growth
Tunkillia has grown in both of its deposits—particularly in the main ‘Area 223’, where recent drilling extended the block model beyond the optimised pit floor modelled in Barton’s July 2024 initial scoping study.
The extensions are located below the higher-grade ‘starter pit’ that is estimated to produce over 180,000oz of gold at a cash cost of less than $1,250/oz from approximately 5 million tonnes of feed.
“Combined with the material efficiencies and power savings we are targeting in our comminution modelling, we anticipate that Tunkillia’s forthcoming OSS will yield much improved economics,” managing director Alexander Scanlon said.
Block model work
Barton has also expanded the Tunkillia mineralisation block model following further OSS pit optimisation analyses.
The company announced in late February that it had made strong progress with the OSS, which commenced in November 2024 and is aiming to identify ways of reducing power consumption and de-risk project working capital requirements.
Barton has also completed additional drilling, comminution test work and scenario analyses comparing the performance and recoveries of fresh and oxide materials at different grind sizes in different comminution circuits.
Preliminary analysis has indicated a significant reduction in work indices and power consumption for all material types, with increased effective throughput rates of softer oxide materials during early operations.