Burnstone’s Area 1 under study

Vancouver — Great Basin Gold (GBG-T) has started a prefeasibility study of Area 1 of its Burnstone property in South Africa.

The Burnstone goldfield is in the northeastern part of the Witwatersrand Basin, 80 km southeast of Johannesburg. Hunter Dickinson-led Great Basin acquired the project earlier this year through its purchase of African-based Southgold Exploration.

The resource in Area 1 was recently increased to 29.2 million tonnes grading 5.73 grams gold, or 5.4 million oz. gold.

Preliminary scoping work examined the potential for a 1.5-million-tonne-per-year operation capable of producing 200,000 oz. gold per year via a single decline. Plans call for a combination of narrow-vein mining and mechanized development in the footwall of the Kimberly Reef.

Independent mine planning and design, metallurgical tests, and environmental permitting studies will be followed up with a full bankable feasibility study by the end of the third quarter.

The Burnstone goldfield comprises four gold-rich areas in an 18-km, northwesterly trending corridor of ancient river channels. The central part of the corridor is thought to have been uplifted by faulting, which brought it up to depths of between 250 to 750 metres. This is shallow in comparision with other Witwatersrand deposits, which exceed depths of 1,000 metres.

Area 2 contains 2.8 million oz. gold in 13.5 million tonnes grading 6.5 grams gold in the inferred category.