CANADIAN listed miner, Pambili Natural Resources Corporation (Pambili) is conducting a six-hole drilling programme at its Golden Valley Mine (GVM) with the objective to identify gold and quickly start production.
In August, Pambili revealed it would conduct an initial resource drilling programme that was expected to confirm the scale of gold at GVM during the current quarter.
The miner has two projects in Zimbabwe, namely, GVM and Happy Valley Mine which both mine gold.
GVM has a history of high-grade underground mining with historic gold production located in the Matabeleland province along the Bulawayo Greenstone Belt.
Meanwhile, Happy Valley Mine is a producing gold mine located 15km from Bulawayo.
“Pambili is conducting a planned six-hole drilling programme at GVM with the objective of identifying a gold resource it can rapidly bring into production,” Pambili said in a statement.
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“The corporation re-started gold production at GVM earlier this year, processing sands from the project’s third-party toll milling facilities as well as from processing material from the drives developed to facilitate the underground drilling
programme.”
To date, Pambili said, it had completed two holes — EADD004 and EADD006 — each to a depth of 100 metres (m), targeting a NW-trending shear (fault line) previously interpreted from airborne geophysics.
“Pambili is investigating the potential that this shear represents a parallel structure to the historically mined orebody at GVM. Pambili’s first down-dip hole — EADD001 — has reached a depth of 25m and is expected to be completed over the coming days. This hole is testing the down-dip continuity of the historic GVM orebody,” Pambili said.
“The lithology of the core retrieved from the holes drilled to date along with planned remaining holes can be seen in the schematic below. The red wireframes are interpretation of quartz veins that appear in both EADD004 and EADD006.”
Pambili has also selected 15,2m of core from its drilling to date for assaying at an ISO/IEC 17025- accredited commercial metallurgical assay laboratory in Zimbabwe.
ISO/IEC 17025 is an international standard under the International Organisation of Standardisation that enables laboratories to demonstrate that they operate competently and generate valid results.
“This core either displays sulphide mineralisation or the potential to carry gold, and Pambili expects the results of assaying to help to guide the direction of subsequent holes,” Pambili added.
Pambili chief executive officer Jon Harris said it was encouraging to see that the miner’s first two holes encountered known gold pathfinder minerals like pyrite and quartz.
“The down-dip hole is not yet complete, but even within the first 25m we have encountered mineralised zones including pyrite along with several quartz stringers. We look forward to seeing how much more mineralisation we encounter as the hole reaches its planned depth,” he said.“We also look forward to receiving assay results from our core over the coming weeks. These results will provide Pambili with a better understanding of GVM’s commercial gold potential beyond the extent of the historic underground mining area.
“Improving our understanding on the structural controls of gold mineralisation at GVM will help to improve the targeting of our remaining underground holes as well as planning the surface holes required to target a code-compliant mineral resource at the project.”
Pambili recently announced plans to abandon oil and gas exploration and a capital raising initiative to focus on exploring GVM.