RE: In the news29 Jun 2018 15:48
has been suggested that Creasy has being spending as much as $10m annually on his privately held ground to find the next big one. IGO, in the meantime, allocated $30m to the hunt (including looking for potential extensions of the Nova intrusive) for the all-but-gone 2018 financial year.
The pregnant pause between Nova’s 2012 discovery and a new find is despite more than 20 companies drilling more than 80 valid targets. As time has gone by, many of the juniors and majors that rushed into the region in 2012 have packed up and gone home.
IGO has been hoovering up all the ground from the disheartened it can, and now holds a 14,300sqkm position. Despite that effort, it seems Creasy has beaten it to the punch in finding the next best thing to Nova, assuming the speculation is on the mark.
Obviously any deal to acquire the Creasy discovery will be heavily scrutinised because of Creasy’s IGO shareholding.
But a deal that rewards Creasy for his efforts, while providing a major value uplift to IGO through the addition of truckable reserves to Nova’s current 10-year life, would be a classic win-win.
The broader industry would also be a winner. Should the Creasy discovery be confirmed, those that remained committed to the Fraser Range hunt will pop back on to the radar.
And those that left when the going got tough will rush back in to pick up what crumbs IGO has left on the table.
Paterson heats up (again):
As mentioned here previously, the broader industry is also waiting on confirmation by Rio Tinto that it has made a sizeable copper discovery in the sand dunes of WA’s remote Paterson province.
Confirmation of the discovery, indicated by satellite imagery to be 120km north-north-west of Newcrest’s gold-copper mine, would fire-up interest in a bunch of juniors that have tenements elsewhere along the Paterson belt.
Having said that, interest in the Paterson has stretched in recent days all the way to London’s AIM market where active Paterson explorer Greatland Gold plc is listed.
It shares have surged 170% to 191 pence since June 21. The first leg-up came from news its field crew had recovered “multiple pieces of gold” as the company put it, where nuggets would have done, from surface sampling at the Black Hills project, 30km east of Newcrest’s Telfer.
A second leg up for Greatland came this week with the release of assay results from the adjacent Havieron prospect. It was a 121m intersection from 497m grading 2.93g/tonne gold and 0.23% copper, including 11.5m at 21.23 g/tonne and 0.67% copper from 568.5m and 0.5m grading a bonanza 137g/tonne gold and 1.8% copper from 573m, which got punters in the old dart excited.
Havieron was drilled by Newcrest between 1991-2003 but high grade hits weren’t part of the story back then.
Havieron sits in the south-east of a structural corridor which runs all the way up to, and beyond, the site of the rumoured Rio copper discovery in the north-west. And while the rocks being tested a
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