Heavy Minerals to start maiden drilling at Port Gregory and Red Hill garnet tenements
Infill and extensional drilling at Port Gregory will improve confidence in the resource and potentially add further inventory.
Heavy Minerals (ASX: HVY) will begin drilling next month at its wholly-owned Port Gregory and Red Hill garnet tenements in Western Australia.
Specialist mineral sands contractor Bostech Drilling has been engaged to complete 130 aircore holes for a total 4,600 metres at Port Gregory to extend the existing mineral resource estimate of 135 million tonnes at 4% total heavy minerals (THM) at a 2% cut-off grade.
Drilling also aims to increase the total resource based on extension drilling to the east, north and south prior to the start of a pre-feasibility study next year.
Assays from the flagship Port Gregory project are expected to be received in February and will be followed in March by a resource update.
Red Hill drilling
Following the Port Gregory campaign, Bostech’s rig will move to the newly-discovered Red Hill prospect, 37 kilometres to the south, where it will complete 1,400m of maiden aircore drilling.
The work follows on from positive auger sampling results earlier this year and will feed into a mineral resource estimate expected in April.
DGPR surveys
Heavy Minerals recently completed DGPR (deep ground penetrating radar) surveys at Port Gregory and Red Hill to to confirm the thickness of sand packages prior to drilling and to confirm the limestone basement.
The results are expected to aid in the interpretation of the upcoming drilling programs.
Extraction plan
Port Gregory comprises six tenements across 227.28 square kilometres of land north of Geraldton.
Heavy Minerals plans to extract mineralisation from surface with limited overburden removal via conventional dozer trap mining from shallow pits to produce a slurry which will be pumped to a wet concentration plant.
A heavy mineral concentrate will be produced by processing sand fraction through a series of gravity spirals and up-current classifiers before being transferred to a dry mineral separation plant, where it will be further upgraded by removing material via magnetic separation.
The magnetic concentrate is dominated by ilmenite and will form a valuable by-product, which is expected to attract a market price of around $640 per tonne.
The garnet material will then be screened, bagged and shipped to Geraldton port for transport to overseas customers.