JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Australian nickel and base metals explorer Breakaway Resources has started a 2 000 m diamond drilling programme on its high priority Saints nickel target, which lies within the company’s 100% owned Scotia project, in Western Australia.

Breakaway said in a statement that it viewed this programme as a key development in realising its primary corporate objective of discovering a stand-alone nickel sulphide deposit of no less than 30 000 t nickel metal at 3% nickel, and added that it looked forward to carrying out additional drilling based on success in the initial programme.

Nickel sulphide mineralisation at the Saints target was present as a series of sub-parallel planar zones developed along a strongly sheared eastern and western ultramafic/basalt contact termed the Eastern and Western Contact, respectively.

Breakaway has previously defined a north plunging zone of thickened high-grade matrix sulphides at the southern end of the Western Contact over about 150 m strike length to a vertical depth of 180 m.

The north plunging zone remained open in all directions and the current drilling would test the mineralisation for a further 50 m along strike and 150 m down plunge to a vertical depth of 280 m.

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