Great Northern Minerals is expanding its ground around the Golden Ant gold projects in North Queensland.

The company says it has been granted two new exploration permits, taking the combined project area to 695sq km.

One permit is linked to the Camel Creek and Golden Cup projects while the other surrounds granted mining leases at Big Rush.

Great Northern Minerals last week announced a maiden gold resource of 256,000 tonnes at 3.6g/tonne gold for about 30,000oz of contained gold at the Golden Cup mine.

The Perth-based company acquired the Golden Ant group of projects in August in a deal with Q-Generate.

The package includes the former Camel Creek, Golden Cup and Big Rush operations, which produced more than 150,000 ounces of gold in their time using simple heap leach surface mining methods.

It was quick to launch and extensive drilling campaign across the three sites and has also carried out sampling of heap leach dumps at the projects.

The samples have been analyses at ALS Laboratories in Townsville by Fire Assay. Assays range from 0.16g to 11.35g per tonne of gold.

Great Northern described the results as encouraging and said it was now considering options to effectively test gold grades throughout the Golden Ant heap leach dumps, probably through a close-space reverse circulation drilling program

It is also investigating the use of ore sorting technologies.