Liberty Gold drills 0.87 g/t Au over 74.3 metres
Liberty Gold Corp. [LGD-TSX] said it has completed a very successful field season at its 100%-owned Goldstrike project in southwestern Utah.
The company said assay results from a large-diameter, metallurgical core drilling program continue to confirm the presence of high-grade oxide mineralization of significant thicknesses, while reverse circulation and sonic drilling confirm the presence of above-cut-off-grade mineralization in historic surficial rock storage areas.
The 2022 program included 12 metallurgical PQ core holes totalling 1,412 metres. Highlights include 0.87 g/t gold over 74.3 metres, including 1.51 g/t gold over 12.3 metres in PGS863C (from 20.3 metres to 94.6 metres) in the Basin area.
The core holes drilled in 2022 were designed to fill in sampling gaps in the metallurgical model and bring the overall metallurgical testing up to a prefeasibility level.
The latest results were released after the close of trading on December 5, 2022, when Liberty Gold shares closed at 46 cents. The shares are currently trading in a 52-week range of $1.21 and 31.5 cents.
“Goldstrike continues to yield strong drill results, which support its potential as a solid, low-cost, early-entry asset as we advance towards a pre-feasibility decision,” said Liberty Gold President and CEO Jason Attew. “The key focus of the team going into the next year is on de-risking: securing a water supply and progressing land status,” he said. “We look forward to updating the resource model and internal evaluations next year, ahead of a decision to kick off further engineering studies.’’
Liberty Gold is focused on the discovery and advancement of large gold deposits that can be mine profitably in open pit scenarios. Its portfolio of projects are located in the United States and Europe. Its flagship projects are Goldstrike in southwest Utah, Black Pine in southeastern Utah, and Kinsley Mountain in southeast Elko County, Nevada. All three are past-producing open pit mines.
Goldstrike is located in eastern Great basin, immediately adjacent to the Utah/Nevada border, and is a Carlin-style gold system, similar in many ways to the prolific deposits located along Nevada’s Carlin Trend. Like Black Pine and Nevada Gold Mines’ Long Canyon deposit, Goldstrike represents part of a growing number of Carlin-style gold systems located off the main Carlin and Cortez trends in underexplored parts of the Great basin.
Goldstrike is a past-producing, open-pit, run-of-mine heap leach operation that produced 209,000 ounces of gold and 197,000 ounces of silver between 1988 and 1994 during a period of historically low gold prices. Ore was mined from 12 shallow pits at an average grade of 1.2 g/t gold.
Liberty Gold carried out extensive compilation and, drilling and metallurgical work, releasing a resource estimate and preliminary economic assessment (PEA) in 2018. The resource includes 925,000 ounces of indicated gold, grading 0.50 g/t and 296,000 ounces of inferred gold grading 0.47 g/t, backed by over 1,700 drill holes.
The PEA envisages an operation producing 915,516 ounces of gold at a life-of-mine all-in-sustaining cost of US$793 an ounce, returning a net present value at a 5.0% discount rate of US$129.5 million