Renowned explorers chase the next Gruyere on WA’s gold frontier

• It’s 13 years since Gold Road Resources made the now 9Moz Gruyere gold discovery in WA’s remote Yamarna Belt
• Now Riedel Resources is lining up the most substantial exploration program from a junior in the region in 30 years
• Gold drilling to begin at Cosmo project this month

It’s 13 years since Gold Road Resources made the fateful discovery of the Gruyere gold deposit in October 2013 while drilling on the Yamarna Belt, a remote region of WA 200km east of the gold rush town of Laverton.

On the western tip of the Great Victoria Desert, it would prove to be a multi-million-ounce discovery, leading to a $350 million joint venture with Gold Fields and, eventually, a $3.7bn cash takeover from the South African giant.

Gold Road was worth just $54m when the discovery hole was announced.

It’s now one of Australia’s largest gold mines, producing 300,000ozpa.

But discoveries in the vicinity of the 9Moz behemoth are few and far between.

Gold Fields’ 1.6Moz Golden Highway Trend is among the few finds of substance despite the presence of a major arterial road, the Great Central, slated to eventually be part of a paved highway stretching from Laverton in WA to Winton in Central Queensland known as the Outback Way.

That could be changing.

Riedel Resources’ (ASX:RIE) acquisition of the Cosmo and Mount Venn projects from Sarama Resources (ASX:SRR) represents the first major exploration campaign by a junior unattached to Gold Road and Gold Fields in the district in years.

Drill rigs are ready to roll at Cosmo after the receipt of Aboriginal heritage clearance, with former Gold Fields, Moto Gold Mines and Sarama executive Paul Schmiede making the move over to run the show as CEO.

He says periods of weak gold prices and fragmented ownership have prevented previous operators from testing its potential.

“Whilst gold has been strong in that timeframe, certainly gold has had its ups and downs and unless you do have a significant discovery in your portfolio that does cause capital to be expensive,” Schmiede told Stockhead.

“Certain companies that might have been operating through there, they didn’t necessarily have access to capital to pursue their exploration programs.

“In respect of Mount Venn, there’s been that fragmented ownership. I think that’s been a key issue and as soon as you change jockeys … the exploration momentum drops off and then people tend to redo work or start from scratch, or lose time.”

Core focus

For the first time, gold discoveries at Cosmo and Mount Venn are the primary focus of the company exploring the sites.

Sarama vended the assets into Riedel, taking an initial 32% stake, in order to focus on an arbitration claim potentially worth hundreds of millions of dollars over the expropriation of the 2.9Moz Sanutara gold discovery by the Burkina Faso government.

Schmiede said Riedel would now be able to undertake the sort of “top to bottom” exploration needed to establish targets in an area with a significant amount of cover.

In the case of Cosmo, the last drilling amounted only to shallow rotary air blast drilling in 1995 completed to a depth of around 5m.

Under Sarama’s ownership, a new technique called ultrafine fraction soil sampling, originally developed by the CSIRO, has been used to cover the whole Cosmo project.

The method allows very low-tenor mineral anomalism to be identified in cover which dilutes the signature of valuable commodities like gold.

“That’s what has delivered quite a few kilometre-scale gold anomalies that are coincident with geological features, lithology features and also interesting patterns and features in the geophysical data sets,” Schmiede said.

“It’s been, I think, a successful campaign in that regard and that’s essentially what’s produced these targets that we’re looking to drill in a couple of weeks’ time.”

Several targets now sit along the 50km long belt, bearing names inspired by George Miller’s Mad Max series.

In the works is around 7200m of drilling, intended to be either all aircore or a mix of aircore and reverse circulation drilling.

Schmiede says Riedel will push drilling far deeper than historic explorers, reaching targeted depths of between 50m and 150m.

It comes after fieldwork recommenced at the 580km2 Cosmo in July, including a program to collect 1100 soil geochemistry samples.

As well as Gruyere to the east, Cosmo sits around an hour outside of Laverton and within 100km of Regis Resources’ (ASX:RRL) 7.4Moz Duketon gold operations.

Multiple opportunities

Along with Cosmo, Riedel has also picked up the Mt Venn project, 420km2 of ground featuring multiple gold occurrences with copper and platinum group metals prospects.

That gives the company control over coherent packages running on either side of the Great Central Road which represent two of WA’s last remaining greenstone belts to be systematically explored, the company has said.

Previously owned by Cazaly Resources (ASX:CAZ) and Orbminco (ASX:OB1) but not the primary focus of either company, it is close to where Great Boulder Resources (ASX:GBR) made a notable copper discovery, now part of the Cosmo Metals (ASX:CMO) portfolio.

“Mount Venn is … multi-commodity in terms of targets for exploration,” Schmiede said.

“Our primary focus is gold … but there are copper, zinc and nickel targets within the total package, probably more to the extreme north and the extreme southeast.

“Our focus is really gold through the majority of the property.”

A discovery there or at Cosmo would be another feather in the caps of Schmiede, non-exec director Andrew Dinning and geologist Jack Hamilton, previously credited with roles in the 31Moz Kibali mine in the DR Congo.

Also within the Riedel portfolio is the Kingman project in Arizona. Previous management viewed the asset as a potential small-scale mining operation, boasting 494,000t at a tidy 4g/t gold and 43.4g/t silver for 64,000oz gold and 689,000oz silver in an inferred resource.

While that was attractive in a rising gold price environment, Schmiede says Riedel wants to understand the broader exploration opportunity at the project.

“As a whole, the property’s been underexplored, certainly about two-thirds of it hasn’t even had any soil geochemistry work done on it, which we think is probably a pretty much a first pass tool … to generate targets,” he said.

“Our intention with sort of the new management moving in is to roll it back from that development type proposition back to exploration.

“One is to extend and expand the existing resource. Two is to look and see what comes out of that soil geochemistry on the two-thirds of the property that hasn’t been covered.

“Whilst it’s on a different continent, it’s all English speaking obviously, Arizona’s pro mining, pro exploration, you can do stuff there.

“I think it fits in the portfolio quite nicely, probably sitting behind the WA stuff in terms of activity for us because we need to keep focused on the Laverton assets.

“And soon enough we’ll get our heads around Kingman and Arizona, and get into some field work there.”

At Stockhead, we tell it like it is. While Riedel Resources is a Stockhead advertiser, it did not sponsor this article.

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