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TG Metals on the pathway to gold production

TG Metals (ASX:TG6) is putting the finishing touches on a resource update for its Van Uden gold project in Western Australia as it maps a path to near-term production.

The company acquired 80% of Van Uden, in the Forrestania Greenstone Belt, last year, with the minority interest held by China’s Barto Gold.

There’s been plenty of activity in the well-endowed belt of late, with acquisitive regional player Forrestania Resources unsuccessfully campaigning for a TG board seat late last year.

Van Uden sits 120km south of Southern Cross, close to Barto’s operating Marvel Loch plant.

The shallow Tasman and Diemens pits historically produced 136,023 tonnes at 2.54 grams per tonne gold for 11,142 ounces of gold.

The project sits on granted mining leases, already has sealed haul roads and hosts remnant stockpiles.

“Those are fully permitted for us to truck them off site as soon as we get a toll milling agreement,” TG CEO David Selfe told the RIU Explorers Conference in Fremantle last week.

Van Uden has a current resource of 6.35 million tonnes at 1.1g/t gold for 227,140oz of gold down to a depth of 148m.

TG is awaiting final assays ahead of the release of an updated resource next month.

Selfe expects the resource, which is open along strike and down-dip and will extend to beyond 200m depth, to grow “substantially”.

New shallow results reported last week included 30m at 1.6g/t gold; 15m at 2.22g/t gold; 13m at 2.48g/t gold; and 13m at 2.23g/t gold.

Exploration upside

The strike length of the project has been extended from 2.5km to 7km.

“We recently had some success with a new discovery 550m to the south of the Tasman pit and that is looking like a lookalike for Tasman as well,” Selfe said.

The discovery returned hits including 3m at 3.46g/t gold and 11m at 1.19g/t gold.

“It is very light drilling in between Tasman and that discovery, so the opportunity for expanding the resource along strike is huge,” Selfe said.

TG has already defined additional undrilled targets to the west of Van Uden through soil sampling.

Around 20km to the south, the Gold City prospect has been identified as a potential satellite deposit.

There are historical gold workings at Downtown and only 18 holes have ever been drilled, which returned results including 14m at 2.26g/t gold from 20m; 25m at 1.09g/t gold from 18m; and 15m at 1.48g/t gold from 20m.

Mineralisation remains open in all directions.

“It’s a large and strong system. It’s not that complicated, either,” Selfe said.

“There’s a few lodes in the system, but it doesn’t really break up that much, and it’s fairly continuous, and that’s what I like.”

Lithium option

Around 130km away is TG’s Lake Johnston lithium project.

Selfe said gold was the company’s “main game”, but work would increase at Lake Johnston due to the rise in the lithium price.

“This was at a virgin discovery by TG Metals back in 2023, and it was basically defined from a soil anomaly,” he said, adding that it was the first hard rock lithium deposit the company knew of to be defined by a soil anomaly without any outcrop.

The Burmeister lithium deposit has an exploration target of 15.6-20.1Mt at 0.97-1.19% lithium oxide, based on drilling completed by TG.

Selfe said the company would need to drill closer spaced holes to define an initial resource.

“But [they are] very consistent pegmatites, which is unusual for lithium pegmatites,” he said.

“Most lithium pegmatites will blow out at certain stages, and they’ll be all over the place in terms of orientation, but the pegmatites of Burmeister are very consistent, and we know when we drill somewhere we’re going to hit it.”

The company has completed extensive metallurgical test work on Burmeister, leading to the development of its own process that materially enhances the recovery and quality of spodumene concentrates for both dense media separation and flotation.

Earlier this month, TG lodged a provisional patent application to secure the intellectual property rights for the technology.

“The aim here is for a long life, open-pittable, standalone operation at Burmeister in the future,” Selfe said.

Source: Stockhead