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(Alliance News) - Precious metals exploration and development company ECR Minerals PLC said Tuesday its gold nugget test programme at its Creswick project in Victoria, Australia is
In May, the company completed 1,687 metres of reverse circulation drilling over 17 holes at Creswick, targeting a number of quartz vein orientations and more than a third of all metres drilled contained quartz. A technical review confirmed that the gold mineralisation is "nuggety", which can cause understated assays.
ECR has now devised a "structured approach" to test zones containing quartz collected from the campaign - by splitting them into "bags", each containing about 30 kilograms.
"I am extremely pleased with the professionalism of the company's technical team in devising the structured approach to bag testing that has been developed. Creswick is a unique project and the assessment of in-situ gold mineralisation requires bespoke project management and technical application," said Chief Executive Craig Brown.
The company used an initial trial selection process, using a metal detector, to prioritise zones with a metallic signal. ECR said this would "expedite" the sample selection.
With the detecting now underway, ECR said "a number" of bags tested positive for metal content and have been removed from the site for "whole-of-bag" testing.
Brown continued: "I am delighted that our first metal detecting of bags has already highlighted metal content, which we expect is reflective of nugget gold mineralisation as samples from depth are unlikely to contain other detectable metals."
"Our internal modelling suggests the Dimocks Main Shale is large enough to potentially host a multi-million ounce gold deposit at Creswick and therefore ECR are allocating resources to this project in a prioritised manner whilst continuing to develop our other Australian gold projects in parallel," added Brown.
ECR said an initial update on the testing process is expected in the near term and will issue further interim updates as the bag testing process continues.
Shares in ECR Minerals were down 7.1% Tuesday at 0.95 pence each.
