Flagship Minerals data review uncovers deep Chilean gold riches
- James Pearson
- Sep 11
- 3 min read
Flagship Minerals (ASX: FLG) is cracking open a treasure chest of historic Anglo American drill data at its Pantanillo gold project in Chile’s fabled Maricunga Belt to reveal uber-thick gold zones at depth.
The review is already shaping up as a game changer for the company and points to significant down-dip potential, as it ramps up work to convert the project’s existing 1.05-million-ounce foreign estimate into a JORC-compliant resource.
The company says its latest findings came from three cross sections running north-south across the main orebody, which have thrown up broad mineralised zones up to 500 metres wide. Multiple drill holes end in gold.
Standout holes included 109.5m grading 1.18 grams per tonne (g/t) gold from 148m, 177.9m at 0.66g/t from just 18m, and 75.4m at 0.87g/t from 126m. Several other holes also delivered runs of more than 300m at grades better than 0.5g/t. More returned long runs close to a gram per tonne with higher-grade cores.
One hole in particular punched 400m below the current pit shell, carving out a mammoth 218m hit at 0.55g/t before finishing in gold at 519m depth - the clearest sign yet that Pantanillo’s riches run deeper.
The latest numbers build on some already outstanding earlier results, including whopping oxide intercepts of 116m at 1.5g/t and 142m at 1.13g/t gold from close to surface.
Armed with the sort of numbers that exploration companies can only dream about, Flagship says Pantanillo has the potential to evolve into a large-scale heap leach operation capable of producing 100,000 ounces of gold a year for a decade or more.
The Anglo American dataset for Pantanillo continues to produce the goods. What we are seeing are many drill holes pulling up in mineralisation, and the grades and widths are exceptional, with several drill holes showing high-grade intersections finishing in mineralisation.
Flagship Minerals Managing Director Paul Lock
Under a recent deal struck with Anglo American Norte, Flagship agreed to pay the mining giant up to $2.85 million for a treasure trove of records compiled by Kinross Gold, Orosur Mining and Anglo across 33 years of exploration at Pantanillo.
Flagship says the sheer scale of the dataset is staggering, with more than 700 folders, 10,000 files and 32GB of information now in its hands. The drill hole database alone includes 30,000m of drilling across 183 holes and 18,865 assayed samples.
Notably, Flagship has also bagged some 14,000m of diamond drill core, together with assay pulps and rejects, neatly stored by Anglo in Copiapó and now ready to be cracked open for fresh analysis.
Much of the drilling has centred on its Pantanillo Norte target, already home to a hefty 1.05-million-ounce gold resource at 0.69g/t. As it currently sits in the “qualifying foreign” bucket, Flagship’s priority is to harness its newly acquired data to convert that number into a fully JORC-compliant resource.
With the whole trade costing just shy of $3 million, the company has scored a serious win by picking up the ready-made history for barely a tenth of the estimated $30 million and five years it would take to drill Pantanillo from scratch.
The next steps will focus on validating and resampling core, along with confirmatory and infill drilling where needed, before Flagship runs a suite of metallurgical tests. All of this will feed into a new JORC-compliant resource and, in time, development studies.
Flagship will also leverage the dataset to chase growth through down-dip extensions and step-outs. With early signs of both oxide and sulphide upside and additional targets north, south and in big alteration zones northwest, Pantanillo’s growth runway looks wide open.
The project sits in the heart of the Maricunga gold belt – a region that has already coughed up multiple multi-million-ounce deposits. The corridor is literally oozing gold, with more than 65 million ounces already on the books, headlined by Newmont-Barrick Mining’s jaw-dropping 27-million-ounce Norte Abierto mine, 40 kilometres southwest of Pantanillo.
Adding to the list of mammoth gold plays, Kinross Mining’s 10.7-million-ounce Maricunga project lies 25km west, while Hochschild Mining’s 11-million-ounce Volcan deposit sits almost on Flagship’s doorstep, just 10km northwest.
If the down-dip extensions deliver as the early data suggests, Pantanillo could quickly move from a 1-million-ounce foreign estimate to a multi-million-ounce JORC resource. And with gold markets running hot, Flagship is clearly positioning itself to ride the wave.
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