Second Strike For Gold Prospector

0
1821

Australia-listed Geopacific Resources announced yesterday it had made a second gold discovery in the Prospect 181 area of the Kou Sa project in the northern Preah Vihear province.

Geopacific’s Prospect 118 location plan shows where the gold is. GEOPACIFIC

The discovery in the Chep district near the Laos border came about three months after the first discovery in January.

“The board of Geopacific Resources Ltd (Geopacific) is pleased to provide results on the gold and silver discovery at Prospect 118 of the Kou Sa project in Cambodia,” the company said.

“This is the second discovery this year, resulting from the completing drilling programme with the drilling target defined from soil sampling and trenching programmes.”

The company said the recent scout diamond drilling of anomalous gold and silver zones identified in 2017 trenching has intersected zones of high-grade epithermal-style, gold-silver mineralisation over a strike length of more than 150 metres.

These results further confirmed the prospect of the Kou Sa project for precious and base metal mineralisation, with much of licence area still untested by drilling, it added.

Managing director Ron Heeks said the prospectivity of the Kou Sa project had been greatly enhanced by this new, large epithermal gold discovery.

“This is the second discovery from the small drill programme that was recently completed,” he said.

“In both recent discoveries, the wide zones of quartz indicate that a large fluid movement has deposited the mineralisation and this can only be driven by a significantly sized source.

“This is consistent with results across the project, all of which indicates a significant engine driving the deposition of mineralisation,” Mr Heeks said.

“The results from this drilling indicate that we have probably encountered an outflow zone of an epithermal system and that the main zone may be located nearby.

“The use of IP geophysics to develop drilling targets has worked successfully in other areas of the project and is expected to assist in targeting the core of the mineralisation in the areas of these two discoveries,” he added.

Yos Monirath, director-general of the general department of mineral resources, said the company had been exploring for three or four years. The results proved that the Kou Sa project had potential for the company.

“With the initial result of the exploration, it will benefit Cambodia’s economy. When it can be mined for business or transaction, we get profit from the project written by the law,” Mr Monirath said.

Geopacific has explored Kou Sa for copper and gold since 2013, releasing an initial resource complying with the JORC 2012 international mining reporting standard in July 2016.

Economic studies indicate the potential for an open pit mining operation with a simple flotation plant to produce a copper-gold-silver concentrate.

The project benefits from low costs, impressive logistics and flat topography. The operating environment is highly cost-effective with hydro-electric, grid power and fibre-optic cable running along the bitumen highway to the campsite, which is 5km from the proposed plant site.

This article was originally published in the Khmer Times.

[democracy id=”154″]