Noricum Gold Ltd (LON:NMG) Managing Director Greg Kuenzel caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss the commencement of drilling at Tsitel Sopeli, what’s happening in the background & what this means for shareholders
Q1: You’ve just announced the commencement of a 13 hole drilling programme at your Bolnisi project, can you talk us through the highlights?
A1: Tsitel Sopeli is the second of our priority targets out here in Georgia, Kvemo Bolnisi being the first where we recently completed resource drilling and currently working on the resource modelling, still with a target of being in production by Q3 of this year from that site. Tsitel Sopeli’s the second, it’s very similar to Kvemo Bolnisi in that it’s a large area but we’ve identified within that area a small secondary quartzite gold mineralisation that occurs at surface down to at Tsitel Sopeli around 20 odd metres so it presents us with a grade new term production target. Drilling started this morning, we are planning around initial 500 metres of drilling here, drill holes down to around 40 metres but again dependant on whether we still have mineralisation, they may go a little bit deeper. It’s expected to take 2-3 weeks and is basically being designed to allow us to put together the first resource, well to convert some of the resource and to add to that, so we can start putting together a mine plan, looking at again similarly to Kvemo Bolnisi putting us into production by the end of the year.
Q2: Now I know you’re always busy but what other work is being carried out during the drilling programme, what’s going on in the background?
A2: Noricum Gold is also going to be starting some infill drilling at Kvemo Bolnisi very shortly, hopefully in the next week or so, that’s being designed to add to the resource that we’re already working on there. Resource modelling optimisation work is ongoing, we’re doing some additional metallurgic work as well so that’s all really again the plan being to have that site in production by Q3, we should have some further numbers of the initial resource in the next month or so so we’ll be looking to announce that. So drilling at Kvemo Bolnisi, drilling at Tsitel Sopeli and we’ve also just started testing the IP equipment that we had delivered about 6 weeks ago, IP (Induced Polarisation) is a type of geophysics exploration method that’s being proven to work really well on the style of mineralisation we’re looking at here. So we’ve got quite a large team here in country at the moment just getting the equipment up and running, running some test lines and we could be in a position to start the first IP programmes at Tsitel Sopeli very shortly so again we’ll keep the market updated as these other programmes get underway.
Q3: What does all this mean for Noricum Gold shareholders and potential shareholders?
A3: It means there’s a lot of activity in country, we’re going to have three consecutive programmes, two drill programmes running and a geophysics programme along with a lot of ancillary work and the ongoing work on the resource optimisation so there should be a lot of news over the next 3-6 months. I guess importantly it means everything’s going according to plan as far as our timeline to the next 12 months particularly into production at Kvemo Bolnisi by Q3, followed by production at Tsitel Sopeli, where we’ve started drilling today, by the end of the year so it’s a pretty exciting time with everything moving ahead full steam at the moment.
