Geopacific Resources Accelerates Woodlark Gold Project in PNG with New Drilling Phase

Geopacific Resources (ASX: GPR) has added momentum to its commercialisation of the historical Woodlark gold project in Papua New Guinea, obtaining promising results from the MacKenzie prospect.

The site of a major gold rush in the 1800s and significant mining operations before shutting down during WW2, a range of companies have shown interest over recent decades in Woodlark’s 1.67 million ounce gold reserve.

However, a combination of high development cost estimates due to its remote location, along with political concerns, have continued to stall mining approvals.

New Wave of Drilling

Now, Geopacific, which has endeavoured to advance the project for many years, is launching a new wave of drilling aimed at improving the development numbers.

The company’s strategy has been boosted with the receipt of the high-grade gold intercepts from trench sampling at Little MacKenzie, part of an ongoing program of activities in Woodlark’s under-explored southwest corner.

These results have confirmed the area is highly prospective for further discoveries, with the new program following-up recent high-grade auger and limited historical drill results that highlighted several large coherent gold anomalies.

Notably, the shallow auger drilling returned several individual high-grade assays of up to 20 grams per tonne and a peak assay of 63.6g/t.

Trench and Auger Intercepts

Geopacific now intends to target the trench and auger intercepts within the eastern and western zones over a strike extent of approximately 1 kilometre.

Upon completion of road infrastructure capable of servicing the area, which Geophysics expects over the coming weeks, the company will initiate a program involving 26 drill collars across 3,840m comprising 2,960m in reverse circulation (RC) drilling and 880m in diamond drilling (DD).

The area to the west of the main Little MacKenzie surface mineralisation also appears to have exploration upside, with recent work uncovering a new extended zone approximately 0.5km in length.

‘Strong Prospectivity’

“These trenching results confirm the strong prospectivity of the broader Woodlark King area, with the high-grade auger results and extensive surface anomalies extending known mineralisation over an approximate one km N-S strike extent,” chief executive officer James Fox said.

“A second diamond rig has now arrived on site to complement the existing DD and RC rigs, along with additional earthmoving equipment to assist with road and pad construction.”

“The Little MacKenzie and Wayai Creek targets are shaping up as compelling additions to our pipeline.”