Kristie Batten: Newcomer Green & Gold hits the ground running

GG1 is primarily focused on gold in Queensland but also has critical minerals interests. Pic: Kristie Batten, supplied

One of Australia’s top mining journalists, Kristie Batten, writes for Stockhead every week in her regular column, keeping a watchful eye on the movers and shakers of the small cap resources scene.

Green & Gold Minerals (ASX:GG1) listed on the ASX less than six months ago and has been busy advancing its Queensland portfolio.

The company raised just under $5.7 million in its initial public offering and listed on the ASX on October 7 last year.

“We hit the ground running in October,” Green & Gold managing director Quentin Hill told Stockhead.

“We’d already mobilised the drill rigs before the final listing date after we closed our offer and have been going flat out ever since.”

The company’s flagship project is the Chillagoe gold-silver project, which has an inferred resource of 32,400 ounces of gold and 387,000 ounces of silver at 1.1 grams per tonne gold and 13g/t silver within granted mining leases at Wandoo.

Green & Gold completed 4165m of reverse circulation drilling and 634m of diamond drilling across 31 exploration drill holes at Mt Wandoo and Little Wandoo in the December quarter, prior to the onset of the wet season.

“It should clear up around the end of April, if not a bit earlier, and we’ve already booked the two rigs to get back out there for our second phase,” Hill said. 

The program returned results including 6m at 11.1g/t Au and 281g/t Ag from 38m; 9m at 7.9g/t Au and 51g/t Ag from 59m; and 19m at 2.9g/t Au and 12g/t Ag from 36m.

“What we’ve got to do is get a handle on where these high-grade shoots are, because it’s the high-grade shoots that really add ounces,” Hill said.

An updated resource for Mt Wandoo is due at the end of this month.

Near-term production option

Hill said Green & Gold had a near-term path to development at Mt Wandoo.

The company has already started toll treatment discussions with the owners of the currently idled 600,000 tonnes per annum Mungana mill, which is just 12km from Mt Wandoo.

“We’ve got a granted mining lease, which is often overlooked,” Hill said.

“It saves us so much time, so we’ll be looking to get that into production in the middle of the cycle and turn our resource into cash.”

The updated resource will underpin mining studies

“Those mining studies will be really important in allowing us to both engage with government about amending the conditions on the mining lease, but also talking to the Mungana mill on tonnes and grade, and that’s when the conversations get sensible and we can work out just how we’re going to get the gold out,” Hill said.

“There’s compelling reasons why we see Mt Wandoo as the ideal startup pit to reopen that mill and whomever owns it, we’ve got a compelling case to help them start it up.”

Green & Gold also has the potential to use ore-sorting technology at Mt Wandoo.

“Ore-sorting has the potential to upgrade the resource by about eight times before we get it to a mill, so that really materially changes the economics,” Hill said. 

Further testwork will be carried out after the next phase of drilling.

The green

Last month, Green & Gold announced the acquisition of a critical minerals project, adding the ‘green’ to the ‘gold’ in its name.

Subject to shareholder approval, the company will issue $450,000 worth of shares to a related party for 88 square kilometres of tenements in the Herberton Mineral Field, 85km from Chillagoe.

“We would have vended it in at the float, but the leases weren’t granted, so that was impossible,” Hill said.

“Now they’re granted, we’re making the acquisition and we’re excited.”

The tenements surround ground held by Iltani Resources, which has a resource of 34 million tonnes at 110g/t silver equivalent.

The ground is considered prospective for silver, copper, tin, gold and indium.

“We think that the Herberton Mineral Field is going to soak up hundreds of thousands of drill metres over the next decade or so, just because it’s highly mineralised,” Hill said.

“It’s underexplored for a bunch of reasons, including that it was tied up in small mining leases and so forth, so no one had a systematic approach to exploring it.”

The project features extensive historical workings, which Green & Gold will follow up on.

Earlier this month, Green & Gold reported the discovery of magmatic-hosted heavy rare earths at its Nutgrove project in Queensland.

Rock chips graded up to 2230 parts per million heavy rare earth yttrium oxide in rhyolite and 1605ppm heavy rare earth yttrium oxide in a basalt breccia clast.

Heavy rare earths average 59% of the total rare earths across all new assays.

Rare earth anomalism has been confirmed over an area of 3km by 4km to date.

“The next steps there are to check out what that could mean in terms of scale and if there has been any pockets of upgrading, that would materially impact the economics of a project there,” Hill said.

“What’s also good is that we’ve got the heavy rare earths that people make the magnets with, that people pay the most money for and so that puts us in a good stead as well.

“A slow burn, plenty to do, but also plenty of opportunity there.”

At Stockhead, we tell it like it is. While Green & Gold Minerals is a Stockhead advertiser, it did not sponsor this article.