Empire Metals Ltd (LON:EEE) commenced the next phase of its exploration work at its Eclipse gold project, located 55km north-east of Kalgoorlie, Western Australia.
The programme includes resource drilling at the Eclipse Mine target, where 200 metres of diamond drilling in three holes will be undertaken to duplicate selected recent reverse circulation drillholes for resource estimation purposes. It will also enable initial geotechnical core logging as input to a preliminary pit design and provide samples for metallurgical testing.
Empire will also undertake expansion drilling at the new Jack's Dream discovery, where 1,700 metres of reverse circulation drilling will focus on infill drilling adjacent to wide intersections of mineralisation and high-grade intercepts.
"This next phase of drilling around the Jack's Dream old workings will be especially interesting to see if we can extend the wide near-surface mineralised intercepts we reported previously,” said Mike Struthers, director of Empire Metals.
“There is potential for this to become a satellite to the Eclipse Mine target, expanding the resources and open pit mining opportunity. Meanwhile our work on resources, pit optimisations and related studies at the Eclipse Mine target continues. Initial assessments indicate an open pit operation at Eclipse would fall within the small-scale mining legislation in Western Australia, which provides a fast-track route to production whilst minimising the environmental footprint, but further technical data are required to confirm certain design assumptions.”