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Gold » Industry News
New Talisman buoyed by resource
Hugh de Lacy
New Talisman has declared a doubling of the resource in its historic Karangahake Valley underground mine near Waihi.
• Mining / Resource Industries • Construction
• Drilling • Forestry • Mobile Equipment
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From penny dreadful to potentially wonderful
– that’s the trajectory that long-time basement-
dwelling minnow New Talisman Gold Mines (NTL
on NZX and ASX) has taken since declaring a
doubling of the resource in one part of its historic
Karangahake Valley underground mine near Waihi.
The dual-listed company called a trading
halt on July 12 to announce that the JORC
2012-measured gold resource in its Dubbo
nodule, the first of four currently being re-
assessed, had come in at double its 2004
assessment.
With grades up to a dizzying 146.2 grams
per tonne at a lip-smacking average of 21.98g/t,
the resource now amounts to 312,800oz, 102%
more than previously thought.
NTL chief executive Matthew Hill told Mining
NZ that New Talisman could be “one of the five
richest underground mines in the world”.
The company has a resource consent from
the Hauraki District Council to extract 20,000
cubic metres of ore a year, and underground
development work has begun even as assessment
work on the three other Talisman Deep nodules
continues.
Hill said he was confident these too would
show considerable increases in the resource over
earlier estimates.
NTL is fully funded until 2020 to complete its
prospecting and bulk supply work in preparation
for going into production, while an upgrade to the
existing feasibility study is under way.
The announcement to the New Zealand and
Australian stock exchanges sparked a surge in the
NTL share price which, after sitting for most of the
past 30 years in the penny-dreadful drawer at well
under a cent a share, was by late August this year
trading at 2.3c – 2.7c.
NTL had tickled the interest of investors in
November last year when it had 50 tonnes of ore
from the Dubbo area of the mine processed at
Newmont’s (now OceanaGold’s) Waihi complex,
from which it returned 64.5oz of gold and
227.3oz of silver at respective recovery rates of
52.56g/t and 150.01g/t.
This ore had been sitting outside near the mine
entrance for years awaiting an agreement with the
district council to haul it out over the council road.
Road access permission has since been
granted for the full mining scheme which,
consent-wise, is closing in on a start to full-scale
production.
Meanwhile, another goldmining minnow,
Aorere Resources, has missed out on the Nevada
goldmine it was stalking, and is looking at other
potential buys, according to chief executive Chris
Castle.