Pepper is a blind lode system close to Spartan’s Never Never resource, which has only been identified in recent months. It has quickly become a potential ore source as Spartan strives to restart the idled Dalgaranga mill in Western Australia.
The Eastern Goldfields facility was designed to process the large, lower-grade orebodies that were previously exploited in the area and were expected to be found – not the smaller, occasionally bonanza-grade deposits that are starting to take shape.
Spartan has a hungry mill to feed, and Pepper is becoming a bigger part of the story given it can be accessed from the planned underground development, with the latest results suggesting it continues to improve at depth, much like its sibling.
The deepest intercept to date appears to confirm Pepper remains consistently thick over 120m along strike and 150m down-plunge, with an intercept of 25.24m at 16.66 grams per tonne from 616m.
The core showed three separate high-grade sub-intervals: 4.65m at 52.46gpt, 5.21m at 18.74gpt, and 5.44m at 12.39gpt.
Managing director Simon Lawson said it was the best and highest-grade result from Pepper’s relatively sparse drilling so far and at 420.5 gram-metres was the fourth best intercept ever recorded at the Dalgaranga project.
Today’s assays returned two other lower-grade results, which, while disappointing in terms of gold assays, still provide potentially valuable geological data.
A hit of 20.238m at 0.92gpt came from within the shear zone that defined the northern margin of Never Never, and the other, 12.55m at 1gpt, has helped define the lower-grade zone that sits between Never Never and Pepper and define the edges of the economic mineralisation.
A maiden Pepper resource is expected soon.
Spartan is also preparing to start constructing an underground drill drive it hopes will lower costs for exploration compared to the surface drilling of the past two years and, in the words of Lawson, allow the geologists to “get up close and personal” with what is a new style of mineralisation in the region.
It is one that, somehow, was missed by generations of explorers, including in work that supported planning for the Dalgaranga gold project in the first place.
The Never Never lode has resources of 950,000 ounces and an exploration target of 1.6-1.9Moz.
Pepper sits between Never Never and the Four Pillars prospect at the northern end of the Gilbey’s pit.
