Exploration company Nagambie Resources has announced a new record high assay for its namesake gold and antimony mine in central Victoria, sending its share price on the ASX up 16% on Tuesday.
“The laboratory checked the 340 g/t Au assay three times and confirmed that it was real,” said executive chairperson Mike Trumbull in a statement.
With no visible gold, and no visible sulphides, the assay represents fine, free gold within the quartz vein.
Trumbull said that the volume influence of a gold nugget in quartz (nuggety Bendigo/Ballarat style) can be very limited. The volume influence of fine, free gold, by its nature, can be significantly greater.
“With the deepest intersection to date occurring only 250 m vertically below surface, we have only scratched the surface of what could be a major high-grade, antimony/gold orebody,” he stated.
The 40 economically mineable intersections, or potential stopes, to date have weighted an average of 3.7 m downhole, 1.6 m estimated horizontal stope thickness and 14.5 g/t gold-equivalent.
Nagambie reported an average gold-equivalent grade of 14.5 g/t, or about 0.47 oz/t, which was not only very high by industry standards, but also 4.8 times the estimated mineable cut-off grade of 3 g/t gold-equivalent, indicating potentially low operating cost, high operating margin mineralisation.
The average antimony grade of 5.4% makes the Nagambie mine underground discovery the highest-grade antimony mineralisation in Australia and one of the highest in the world.