Impact Minerals has lodged two new applications for exploration permits at its Blackridge gold project, near Clermont in Central Queensland.

Together with an existing granted EPM and mining lease, they will take Impact’s tenements in the area to about 150sq km – taking in about 90 per cent of the historic Blackridge goldfield.

The gold mined at Blackridge was in the form of coarse nuggets mined mostly underground.

Impact’s new applications cover ground previously tested by reverse circulation drilling at Hard Hill and by reverse circulation and large diameter Calweld drilling at Pewt’s Hill.

The company said its strategy at Blackridge had been to undertake trial mining of the conglomerate to determine the potential for larger scale bulk mining.

This followed two successful bulk sampling programs which returned an average grade of 0.36 grams per cubic metre over significant strike lengths.

Impact says the bulk samples demonstrated that two unique geological features have combined at Blackridge to offer a potential large bulk mining opportunity.

There is a large volume of very weathered oxide material that is soft and very easy to dig. Secondly the oxide material contains gold with exceptional recoveries of at least 95 per cent and probably as high as 98 per cent using simple wet gravity processing techniques.

The company believes the oxide material could potentially be cheap to mine and process at low cut-off grades in the first instance.

Impact said new techniques and procedures for mining nuggetty conglomerate-hosted gold were being pioneered by Novo Resources in the Pilbara region of Western Australia with good success.

“Impact has been following Novo’s progress closely and is now formulating plans to emulate this work at Blackridge,” managing director Michael G Jones said.

“On-ground work will commence on grant of the new licences, expected later in 2020.”