Georgian Mining Corp (LON:GEO) Managing Director Greg Kuenzel caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss the drill results for Kvemo Bolnisi East Gold Discovery
Q1: Greg, when we last spoke you’d announced near-surface intercepts from the first three drill holes at Bolnisi, now you’re reporting gold in all directions. Can you talk us through the highlights of this news?
A1: Today’s drill results relate to what we’ve started calling ‘Gold Zone 2’, within Kvemo Bolnisi East which is our priority target, and we’ve broken it up into three areas, there’s the Copper Zone and then Gold Zone 1 and Gold Zone 2. Now, as you mentioned, we announced a couple of weeks ago some very very good copper grades from the first three drill holes in the Copper Zone, including 114 metres at 1.7% from close to surface and the work in ongoing on the copper target.
What we’ve also been working on though is, last year we identified some gold oxide within the Kvemo Bolnisi area which is a very attractive type of mineralisation for us because it tends to occur close to surface, it’s a good grade being typically between 1 to 2 grams per tonne and there’s been a significant amount of this material leached at our partner’s heap leach plant over the years. So, it’s a material that would be very amenable to heap leaching and one that we have had discussions with our partner as far as starting to supply feed stock to his heap leach plant which is only 7km away so in a similar fashion to the copper, it provides us with a very early stage production target.
This gold zone, Gold Zone 2, which sits just to the north of the copper, was identified by some initial channel sampling we did on the outcropping rocks in the area, we got some fantastic results there from the channel samples including one of almost 100 metres at 1.2 grams per tonne. Having done a couple of thousand metres of channel sampling, we then followed that up with some short drill holes, usually this gold oxide mineralisation only occurs from surface down to around 10/15 metres, so we initially drilled some 20 metre holes and we got some great results. We used a small rig, which was significantly cheaper but would only allow us to go down to that depth, but within the first seven holes we’ve got results including 20 metres at 2.2 grams from surface, 14 at 2 from 5, there are some very very good results occurring either at surface, or close to surface, down to around 20 metres. Importantly, in this area, we’re also seeing the mineralisation open in all directions and many of the holes ended in mineralisation so this has driven us to commence a deeper drill programme so we’re currently doing some scissor holes within the Gold Zone 2 to test the depth extent of this mineralisation. It’s very exciting, it has lifted the potential significantly of the gold oxide mineralisation in the area which, as I said, is very important as we have a heap leach plant only 7km away that can start taking this feed stock.
So, it’s a very very positive result for Georgian Mining Corporation.
Q2: So, do these great results change the development plans in any way?
A2: What they will do is, as I’ve said we’ve been targeting these three areas; the copper and the 2 gold areas, as separate distinct mineralised zones, now, what’s becoming evident, as we do more work on all of these areas, is that they could be part of one underlying larger mineralised ore body. When we’ve talked about the exploration potential at Kvemo Bolnisi and we’ve used a target of 50 million tonnes, the work that we’re doing is effectively joining together some of these areas so given the similarities to Madneuli, which is only 7km away and has mined 80 million tonnes to date, we’re feeling more and more confident we could be dealing with something significant here. What it also does is it means given the proximity of the mineralisation in each of these zones, what we’re now working on is instead of separate open pits, it will probably be one big open pit footprint when we do put this into production which would involve stripping off the gold oxide first, supplying them to the heap leach and then continuing mining the deeper cooper sulphides that tend to sit underneath the gold.
So, the programme is coming along very nicely, what we will do now though is as well as continuing work on the copper sulphides and we’re continuing to do some additional development work on the gold. As I said, we’re going to drill some deeper holes and just see how deep this mineralisation goes, but with peak intercepts within some of those drill samples up to 2-3oz per tonne and others in the 7 grams per tonne category, we’ve got a very very exciting target on our hands now.
Q3: So, with regards to news flow for Georgian Mining Corp, can you talk us through the timeline there?
A3: Over the coming few weeks, we’ll have the remainder of the first 20-odd drill holes on the copper sulphides, they will then also go to drive a resource upgrade on the copper sulphide resource that was announced about 4-5 weeks ago now. That’s important in that our local partner has given us guidance that once we achieve circa 1.5–2 million tonnes, that’ll be the point where we can start looking at mine development and finalising offtake agreements so that’s a very important milestone. We will also have the additional holes done to date on the gold zones and that’ll be followed up with additional drilling and resource upgrades on the gold as well. So, there should be a lot of news flow over the next month or two and some really exciting milestones achieved by Georgian Mining Corp.
