Rockfire delves deeper at NQ gold tenements

Rockfire Resources is kicking off a new drilling campaign at its Plateau gold prospect, spurred on by similarities to the 1.5Moz-plus Mount Wright gold deposit. The company recently raised the equivalent of more than $1.8 million through a share placement to fund work at Plateau, which is within its Lighthouse tenement area about 50km south-east of Charters Towers. The plan is to complete deeper drill testing of Plateau to about 500m below surface, and chief executive officer David Price said work commenced this week. Previous drilling to depths of 230m has resulted in the identification of long, continuous intervals of low-grade gold, including 177m at 0.5 g/t gold. "The host rock, long intervals of low-grade gold mineralisation and the geophysical and geochemical characteristics of Plateau may lead to the discovery of a gold deposit similar to Mount Wright," Mr Price said. "Plateau is being modeled on the Mount Wright similarities and, so far, the model has proven correct. "Of course, geological and mineralisation models do change with increased knowledge of the deposit but, so far, the similarities continue to encourage our progress at Plateau." At Mount Wright, the main zone of economic gold mineralisation was encountered at depths beyond 300m from surface and extended to 1200m depth. Mr Price described Lighthouse as being in a prime location for discovery, amongst large producing mines. The tenement straddles two of the most productive structural corridors on the east coast of Australia, hosting Pajingo (2.4Moz gold), Mt Leyshon (4Moz gold, 2.3Moz silver), Ravenswood (4Moz-plus gold) and Charters Towers (7Moz-plus gold). Mr Price said the Lighthouse tenement area had been explored in the past by major companies including BHP (to 1980), Esso (to 1986), Battle Mountain (to 1988), Rio Tinto (to 1990), Aberfoyle (to 1997) and Newcrest Mining (to 2007). "The work completed by these explorers intersected good gold grades close to surface but it is assumed that these large companies had a minimum resource threshold which was not immediately obvious," Mr Price said. Mr Price said Rockfire always tried to employ local contractors as much as possible before searching outside the local area. "Our pre-collars were drilled by Eagle Drilling out of Charters Towers and our diamond drilling contractor is Lloyd Weller Drilling, also out of Charters Towers," Mr Price said. Should the drilling campaign prove successful, then Rockfire intends to test down to about 750m depth. The recent funds raised will also go towards geophysical surveys at the Lighthouse tenement, including a magnetometer survey and an Induced Polarisation survey. Rockfire also plans to complete magnetometer surveys at its Copperhead and Copper Dome projects in Central Queensland.

Rockfire delves deeper at NQ gold tenements

Industry Queensland

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