Perth explorer to acquire Puhipuhi
Ross Louthean — 9 November 2012
The long-known but lightly explored Puhipuhi epithermal gold-silver prospect in Northland has been taken up by Western Australian junior explorer De Grey Mining Ltd (ASX: DEG).
De Grey has signed a definitive agreement with Waihi Gold Company Ltd, subsidiary of global gold giant Newmont Mining Corporation to fully acquire Puhipuhi after it the American company decided to sell because it was slashing its global exploration budget.
The prospect near Whangerei is an exploration permit granted to Waihi Gold in 2009 and has a term of five years with the right to a further five year extension.
De Grey will acquire the permit subject to the acceptance of the transfer of ownership of the permit by the Ministry of Economic Development, New Zealand.
De Grey’s executive chairman Peter Batten said though exploration at Puhipuhi dates back to the early 1980s, and involved companies such as Homestake Mining, BHP and Macraes, the area remains relatively under-explored.
A more recent holder of Puhipuhi was Canadian company CanAlaska which subsequently withdrew from New Zealand gold exploration to focus on uranium exploration in North America.
Of the 50 drillholes completed within the project area, 18 are less than 100 metres in length, 28 between 100 and 200m length and only four greater than 200m in length.
The drilling has been into what has been interpreted from petrology, geochemistry, mapping and geophysics to be the top of an epithermal system.
Batten said Puhipuhi “is endowed with a number of walk up drill targets.”
Previous significant drilling results include 18 metres grading 3.38 grams/tonne gold and 10.3 g/t silver, including 2m @ 17 g/t Au and 15 g/t Ag) and, in another hole 2m @ 7.6 g/t Au and 70 g/t Ag.
Recently completed geophysical work by Waihi combined with anomalies generated from historic geochemistry surveys has resulted in 11 target areas, nine of which are considered high priority including the two historic mercury mines -- the Rising Sun and Puhipuhi mines.
He said the abandoned silver mine, known as the Northern Silver workings, has not yet been the subject of systematic exploration despite Macraes reporting that sampling of the mine area returned results as high as 1.35 ppm gold and 304 ppm silver and high antimony from the surface as early as 1994.
Puhipuhi is interpreted to represent a well preserved hot spring sinter-breccia system that formed as an outflow from a venting geothermal system.
Mineralisation in these systems is commonly restricted to fluid upflow settings and very low gold contents are deposited near surface.
De Grey thinks Puhipuhi has potential for fissure vein epithermal gold-silver mineralisation that have been developed at Hishikari in Japan, Cracow in Queensland, Sleeper in Nevada and at Waihi.
“The potential for Puhipuhi to host such a fissure vein system has been recognised by several explorers during the last 30 years, however drilling to date has only been relatively shallow, and hasn’t tested the deeper parts of the system where the gold-silver mineralisation is expected to occur,” the company said.
Other drill targets generated from multi-element surface geochemistry and ground based geophysical surveys (IP and CSAMT) also remain untested within the Project area.
Peter Batten, said Puhipuhi was an excellent advanced greenfields epithermal system with defined and untested drill targets, a supportive Government, excellent infrastructure and a very low country risk.
Earlier this year anti-miners in Northland at a public meeting made some amazing and alarmist statements about mining and accused Newmont of undertaking secretive night-time drilling, which the company denied emphatically, saying it was too early to even consider drilling.
Reply With Quote
Bookmarks