RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:RE:$48 Million Investment by Eric Sprott
lifegoeson wrote: Megacopper, this is fantastic news for NFG, it really shows how good this property must be. I wonder what the price tag is going to be to bring everything to production?
I have no idea because I'm no expert when it comes to mining. I have spoken to guys who should know and they think it won't be as expensive as what most investors think because the volume of rock that you have to mine is relatively small compared to the number of ounces you get. The average grade of the Swan Zone at its peak was nearly 60 g/t gold or almost two ounces of gold per ton of rock. Extremely high grade gold. It was the richest in the world a few years and it still ranks in the top three I believe. It was the Swan Zone that changed everything at Fosterville. The Keats Zone will be proven to be much bigger and much better in my opinion.
You can read it below but the Swan Zone was by far the richest zone at Fosterville and it was only between 2 meters and 5 meters wide and averaged about 60 g/t for the first 3 million ounces. So you can get a whole lot of gold in these types of systems in a very small amount of rock. See below for details on the geology. The technical reports are a bit painful to read so I posted the important stuff with all the geological jargon. I can understand why these geologists drink so much after reading some of these technical reports because your brain is fried afterwards. Lol
https://www.kl.gold/our-business/australia/fosterville-mine/default.aspx
Geology & mineralization
The Fosterville Goldfield is located within the Bendigo Structural Zone in the Lachlan Fold Belt. The deposit is hosted by an interbedded turbidite sequence of sandstones, siltstones and shales. This sequence has been metamorphosed to sub-greenschist facies and folded into a set of upright, open to closed folds.
Mineralization at Fosterville is controlled by late brittle faulting. These late brittle faults are generally steeply west dipping reverse faults with a series of moderately west dipping reverse splay faults formed in the footwall of the main fault. There are also moderately east dipping faults which have become more significant footwall to the anticlinal offsets along the west dipping faults. Primary gold mineralization occurs as disseminated arsenopyrite and pyrite forming as a selvage to veins in a quartz–carbonate veinlet stockwork. The mineralization is structurally controlled with high-grade zones localized by the geometric relationship between bedding and faulting. Mineralized shoots are typically 4m to 15m thick, 50m to 150m up/down dip and 300m to 1,500m+ down plunge, and have average grades of 5 10 g/t Au, with individual assays up to 60 g/t Au.
Primary gold also occurs as visible gold at Fosterville, where it variably overprints sulphide mineralization, and is found as disseminated fine specks (>1 mm) of gold within host quartz veins. The visible gold is spatially associated with antimony mineralization, in the form of stibnite that occurs with quartz and varies from replacement and infill of earlier quartz-carbonate stockwork veins, to massive stibnite-only veins of up to 0.5m in width. The stibnite-quartz event occurs in favorable structural locations, such as the Phoenix, Eagle and Lower Phoenix structures.
The occurrence of visible gold is becoming increasingly significant at depth and is observed more frequently below an approximate 800m with depth, down-plunge within the Lower Phoenix and Harrier Gold Systems.
Examples of the visible high-grade gold zones include the Eagle and Swan Zones in the Lower Phoenix area. The Eagle Zone is 0.5 6m in width, 50 80m in dip length and has a down-plunge extent of 700m. The Swan Zone, currently the highest grade mineralized zone at Fosterville, is 2-5m in width, dips west and is presently defined over a 275m strike and a 200m vertical extent. The Eagle and Swan Zones remain open down-plunge for potential Mineral Resource expansion.