Aim-listed exploration company Oriole Resources West Africa has further confirmed high-grade gold findings at its 90%-owned Central Licence Package (CLP) project, in Cameroon.
The district-scale CLP project comprises nine contiguous licences covering 4 091 km2 of previously unexplored paleo-proterozoic to pan-African age rocks, which are highly prospective for a range of commodities, including orogenic-style gold mineralisation and lithium.
In January, Oriole reported the initial rock-chip sampling results of up to 134.10 g/t gold from a 3-km-long corridor of sheared and strongly altered quartz-feldspar porphyry (QFP) and quartz veins at Mbe, one of five licences within the eastern CLP block.
This was further endorsed by the additional 27 selective rock-chip samples, which have returned up to 64.30 g/t gold, supporting the potential of this target area.
The results of selective rock-chip sampling over outcropping rocks at Mbe were delivered last month, delivering up to 134.10 g/t gold from a north-northeast-trending structural corridor. The corridor is 3 km long and at least 70 m wide, crosscutting a broader 12.5-km-long zone of gold-in-soil anomalism.
An additional 27 selective samples taken from outcropping rocks within the same corridor have returned an additional ten samples grading over 1 g/t gold, with the best results of 64.30 g/t gold, 40.80 g/t gold and 16.20 g/t gold.
Samples were collected from a mixture of shear veins, extensional veins and the host-altered QFP, all of which have returned anomalous gold. Oriole said this confirms that the mineralisation is not restricted to just the quartz veining, indicating that Mbe could deliver a bulk-mineable deposit.
“In addition to the very high gold grades seen in the quartz veins, the presence of highly significant mineralisation within the host rocks is an . . . indicator of the potential of this anomaly to host a gold resource of scale,” Oriole CEO Tim Livesey said.
Therefore, a ground-based geophysics programme is currently under way at the Mbe anomaly to test the vein structures at depth and help develop the geological model.
“The abundant evidence of mineralisation . . . confirms and supports our belief in the geology of the area. With excellent infrastructure close by, including main road access and the national power grid, we believe the eastern CLP will deliver on our early indications of a new gold district in Cameroon,” Livesey said.