St Barbara is withdrawing from its joint venture with Alice Queen targeting gold on Horn Island in Queensland’s Torres Strait.

The JV, entered in 2019, covered exploration areas excluding Alice Queen’s Horn Island Inferred Resource area containing 7.9Mt at 1.9g/t gold for 492,000oz.

Alice Queen this month announced that it had kicked off a scoping study to assess the economics of a potential open-pit operation at the historic Horn Island gold mine, including a planned update of that resource.

It said it remained committed to completing that scoping study with a view to bringing the Horn Island project into production as soon as possible.

“We have greatly enjoyed working with St Barbara over the past two years and, although we are disappointed that they have elected not to pursue further exploration work, we believe that there is significant exploration potential at both Horn Island, and the neighbouring islands in the Torres Strait,” Alice Queen managing director Andrew Buxton said.

“However, in the short term, our focus at Horn Island will remain on the areas previously referred to as the ‘excluded areas’, as we believe these demonstrate the greatest prospectivity for short-term production.

“This focus is evident with the recent commencement of our scoping study which will focus on assessing the economics of a potential open pit mine at the historic gold pit.”

Under the terms of the JV, Alice Queen will have the benefit of retaining all of the information generated from St Barbara’s investmnet of about $2.6 million on exploration work.

Alice Queen also has interests in Fiji, announcing recently that it had entered a conditional agreement to acquire Fiji-based exploration company Viti Mining.

Viti Mining and Alice Queen have worked together to secure recently granted applications for the Nabila prospect (SPL1514) and Viani prospect(SPL1513) in Fiji.

Alice Queen will, subject to regulatory and completion conditions, acquire Viti Mining as the means to acquiring the rights to explore the two gold prospects.