A trip to the library has paid dividends for Kula Gold – the ASX-listed minerals explorer discovered it held a historic diamond drill core, taken from one of its tenements in Western Australia’s South West region, that returned 1m at a whopping 51 grams per tonne gold from 39m.
Another core sample identified pegmatite at 73m depth.
The findings were made at the State Government’s Geological Survey of Western Australia (GSWA) core library, which stores drill cores obtained by the minerals industry.
Kula management recently became aware that samples from 22 drill holes on tenements which make up its Brunswick project east of Bunbury, had been donated to GSWA and decided to inspect three of them. BHP drilled the tenements back in 1984 when it was in a joint venture with the now de-listed West Coast Holdings, which donated the cores.
The results do not appear to have interested the “Big Australian”, which only tested the samples for gold and the pathfinder arsenic. But the details have spurred Kula into action and the Perth-based company is now planning a scout drilling program to investigate, in addition to a full suite geochemical analysis of the other two core samples that piqued its interest.
Management says geochemical analysis has come a long way since 1984 and it is keen to find what other minerals are contained in the cores they have obtained free of charge from a diamond drilling program that today would cost about $1 million to roll out.
Unsurprisingly, Kula is also planning to return to the core library to investigate the remaining 19 samples it has not yet examined.
The company now has drill-ready targets at Brunswick – a 300-square-kilometre holding just 45km from the world’s biggest lithium hard-rock mine, the Greenbushes Lithium Mine. It has already identified six prospective lithium pegmatite targets and the project is also prospective for gold, copper, nickel and platinum group element (PGE). An RC program could be triggered as early as next month.
Even closer to Greenbushes sits Kula’s Kirup project, which the company acquired late last year and which lies to Brunswick’s south and just 25km from Greenbushes.
Kula entered an agreement to buy 70 per cent of the Sentinel Exploration-owned project and as part of its due diligence, it conducted reconnaissance mapping and rock-chip sampling of Kirup pegmatites. The samples revealed anomalous lithium rock-chip results returning up to 240.9 parts per million lithium and 71.5ppm lithium and prompted Kula to plan follow-up rock-chip sampling and mapping in the coming months.
At Kula’s Taliah prospect near Southern Cross in WA’s Wheatbelt region, new mapping and rock-chip sampling has validated prior results and given the prospect a boost with many new anomalous lithium and tantalum results.
The best figures are 165ppm lithium and 81ppm tantalum along a magnetic structure of up to 4km. A follow-up soils program is in place for this quarter.
This new Taliah prospect in the Southern Cross project with anomalous LCT suite mineralisation is a nice surprise from some regional work to add to our advancing lithium portfolio of projects. Kula Gold chief executive officer Ric Dawson
Mr Dawson added that the rocks at Taliah were about 2.6 billion years old – so it took very precise science to detect on the surface any evidence of an orebody below.
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