Alba Mineral Resources prepares to commence programme at Clogau
(ALBA ) has told investors that a pitting and sampling programme is scheduled to commence shortly at the waste rock dump at the Clogau-St David’s Gold Mine.
The gold ore mining company said the exercise at Clogau’s mine, where an initial sampling exercise in 2021 returned gold grades of up to 9.89 g/t, will focus on higher-grade zones.
The Group said it has now received clearance for the pitting and sampling exercise to officially start from the competent Mineral Planning Authority and Natural Resources Wales (NRW).
As part of the programme, a total of five pits will be dug within an area of 400m² with 60 kg samples of fines material from each pit submitted for independent assaying, it explained.
The Company said this particular phase will focus on a more targeted area within the dump where, from the results of the previous exercise, higher gold grades are expected to be found.
The objective of this exercise is to assess grades and tonnages more accurately, so that Alba can proceed to a formal decision on the commercial exploitation of the dump as a whole.
Assuming assay values are in line with the first sampling phase, Alba will process ‘a larger volume of the excavated fines through its existing gravity plant to extract the gold content and, thereafter, to submit a plan to mine and process the higher-grade section of the dump,’ it said.
Alba outlined that the entire waste dump at the Clogau’s Mine is estimated to hold up to 5,000 tonnes of fines material which has the potential to be mined at low cost. Further pitting and sampling of other areas of the dump may also be undertaken as a separate exercise.
The waste rock dump at Clogau, which covers 2,833 m², comprises ore rock mined but discarded and not processed for its gold content during previous periods of mining.
The initial sampling of the dump in June 2021 enabled Alba to assess the depositional history of the dump and identify the areas where higher gold grades are to be found.
At the time, significant gold grades of up to 9.89 g/t were returned from the assay laboratory, following analysis of the samples from the eight pits dug by the Company. Average grades returned were up to 4.37 g/t for the fine fractions and 3.80 g/t for the medium fractions.
Commenting on the start of the programme, Mark Austin, Alba Mineral’s Chief Operating Officer, said: “This second pitting and sampling phase should give us a more accurate assessment of the economic potential of one section of the waste rock dump at Clogau.”
In recent weeks, Alba’s Phase 2 surface and underground drilling programme at Clogau was successful in its primary objective of defining a number of target zones for future development within structures which are known to host all of the historic high-grade gold within the mine.
“The fact that we are seeing the same multi-element signature in these areas as was found in the bonanza-grade gold stage at Clogau, gives us a great deal of confidence as we move forward with the development of these zones,” said Frangeskides in a December statement.
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