Hill End Gold

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Sceptics in the northeastern Lachlan Fold Belt of New South Wales, Australia said it couldn’t be done—that the patterns of mineralisation for the enviably high grades of the Hargraves project were just too erratic to mine. But they were wrong.

Hill End Gold (HEG), a strong junior gold miner from New South Wales and 100 per cent owner of Hargraves, has tamed this rumoured erratic high grade mineralisation and proved the folklore to be false. IRJ looks at how Hill End Gold acquired Hargraves, its plans to develop the project, and the technical challenges that this company, through its highly-regarded management team, has overcome.

Beginning with Hill End

Philip Bruce, Managing Director at Hill End Gold, says that the company has been working in this area of New South Wales since 1993, beginning with exploration on its Hill End gold namesake project.

“We’ve been drilling more intensely on the projects, one at Hill End and the other at Hargraves, for the last two years,” Bruce says. “We found with the land strong mineralisation and we’ve gone underground to open it up. Given that it’s fairly coarse gold, what we’ve needed to do is take initially bulk samples, and put those through a plant. Then, having done sufficient development underground, we put the material through on a more continuous basis—we’ve extended the operations on the project.”

Hill End Gold has won an award for their processing plant, winning a ‘highly commended’ award in the ‘processing plant of the year category’ at the 2009 Australia Mining Prospect Awards. “That was put in to help us identify the continuity of the grade of the material we’re mining, and have a bulk sample processing facility available there,” Bruce says of the plant, which is poised to service both the Hill End and Hargraves projects.

“We’ve improved the plant to produce gold at 95 per cent recovery using no cyanide, just using gravity. That’s quite unique.”

Bruce says that the material the company has been putting through has been averaging about 12 grams per tonne for the last couple of years. As the company’s initial project, Hill End has been opened up once again, marking a new stage in this project’s healthy, high grade production history. Bruce says that despite the region’s promising track record, Hill End is relatively under-explored—a result of the coarse gold issue which has put off others in the past.

“We’ve looked at it as a development project, rather than just doing work from the surface drilling and exploration stage, and the development of it has been very successful,” he says. “Now we’re applying that same approach at Hargraves.”

Approaching Hargraves

Hargraves, likely around 10 times the size of Hill End, is the company’s key flagship project enabled by the Hill End project. “We’re currently drilling that with a 12,000 metre drilling programme, and outlining the initial resources of Hargraves. Between the two projects, we believe the scope would be in the order of four to five million ounces,” Bruce says. “It’s one that is similar (to the Hill End Project) in the rocks and the style of mineralisation, however, with Hargraves we see it is going to get much bigger.”

The gold at Hargraves occurs as continuous areas of high-grade type material in both deposits, but folklore warned that this was quite erratically mineralised, and it would be too difficult to estimate the amount of gold in the system just by drilling alone.

“We did some drilling and we then went underground. We identified that at Hill End the mineralisation is quite continuous, even the high grade mineralisation. In some areas we get up to 40 or 50 ounces a tonne, which is quite high. This type of mineralisation we see occurs in continuous zones that are quite predictable,” Bruce reasons. “At Hargraves the approach we’ve taken there is to do a little more intensive drilling. Given that we understand the mineralisation there is quite continuous, it’s really a matter of having enough information to predict it.”

The current drilling programme at Hargraves involves quite a tight pattern of work. This has enabled Hill End to gather enough information on the mineralisation to put together an ore body model already, despite the mythology surrounding the site.

“We’ve been drilling on the main zone there for about four months and the information we’ve been getting has been sufficient for us to put a confident interpretation together for the ore body—which is quite surprising,” Bruce explains.

“That’s really been a breakthrough—in terms of providing the information that we require for the resources. Also, it has provided us with an enhanced potential for the project because the controlling structures for Hargraves, I think, have been very consistent.” Bruce says that these are the feeder structures which bring the gold into the deposit, which the company has been drilling down to 400 metres, discovering that the ore body is still open at depth.

Hargraves and Hill End: the future

Bruce succinctly explains the Hill End project’s role in allowing the company to move on with Hargraves, however this does not mean that the first project is over. “It gives us good groundwork to move on to Hargraves now and I think that Hill End has been useful on all of those fronts. It still has strength towards developing quite a significant project,” he explains.

“We’re opening up the Hill End project a little more intensely. We’re looking to a maiden resource for Hargraves and to kick off initial development for the Hargraves project. On a couple of fronts there there’s tremendous growth prospects for the company, and with the continued drilling at Hargraves on a number of structures where the mineralisation is very intense, we’re looking to extend the resource potential to a significant degree.”

But none of this progress would have been possible without Hill End Gold’s expert team, and as Bruce explains, a project, however high grade and prospective, can only be as good as the team managing it. “The people we have are well experienced in developing and operating projects,” he says. “There are a few things you look for in a company and those are seriously good management and good projects, and if the company is supported, the management has the opportunity to develop the projects it has.”

Looking at the coming year, the company’s aim is clear; identification of the large potential for the Hargraves deposit. “I think that’s one of the major things that will happen this year,” Bruce says.

It certainly looks like realising Hargraves’ potential, thus adding great value to Hill End Gold, is only a matter of time.

www.hillendgold.com.au