Rockfire Resources says rock assay results have expanded numerous targets at its Plateau gold deposit, within North Queensland’s Lighthouse project.

Rockfire Resources has started an early-stage scoping study to consider the economic potential for open-pit mining at Plateau, where it recently announced a 515 per cent increase in gold ounces at the project to more than 200,000 ounces of gold.

The new results come from rock chip sampling, comprising 34 samples, and geological mapping completed over several high priority target areas surrounding Plateau as Rockfire commenced on-site exploration for the 2021 field season.

“This work has confirmed historical high-grade rock samples and extended each target by around 100m in strike,” chief executive officer David Price said.

“These highly encouraging results provide opportunity to increase near-surface gold ounces at Plateau once drilling re-starts.

“Rocks strongly anomalous in gold have now been traced for more than 150m length at the Northwest Breccia and appear to represent two parallel, linear structures.

“Historical rock sampling identified gold up to 2.49g/t gold, however Rockfire’s recent sampling has returned grades up to 16.8g/t gold and 50.4 g/t silver. This gold trend remains open to the east and west.”

Rock chip sampling at the Northern Breccia, has returned results up to 1.89g/t gold and 24.2 g/t silver.

The Northern Breccia has also been shown to be strongly anomalous in zinc, with one value of 0.66 per cent zinc returned, along with a further six rock samples returning above 0.1 per cent zinc. 

The trend of anomalous rock samples was now more than 100m in length – remaining open to the east and west, Mr Price said.

“We envisage the potential for two additional gold zones, similar to the Eastern Breccia, which has a JORC resource of 42,700 ounces of gold,” he said.

“Clearly, it is too early to predict this outcome, however the surficial geochemistry and geophysics are very similar. We will update the market as further exploration results become available, including results from our preliminary scoping study at Plateau.”

Rockfire has a high-resolution ground magnetic survey underway at Plateau. This survey covers the two JORC resources at the Central and Eastern Breccias, as well as the Northwest and Northeast Breccias.

Work planned at Plateau over the next six months includes a gravity survey to define deep targets at the Central Breccia, infill and extension drilling at the Central and Eastern Breccias, soil sampling to define the extent of gold at the Northeast and Northwest Breccias, further exploration drilling across the site.

The Lighthouse tenement straddles two of the most productive structural corridors on the east coast of Australia, hosting Pajingo (2.4Moz gold), Mt Leyshon (4Moz gold, 2.3Moz silver), Ravenswood (4Moz-plus gold) and Charters Towers (7Moz-plus gold). Plateau is being modeled on Mount Wright similarities.