Kent Exploration acquires NZ gold property

Kent Exploration (KEX-V) has assets across North America in Nevada, Washington State, British Columbia and Saskatchewan but this year its focus seems to be entirely fixated on Australia and New Zealand and the junior now plans to hive off its assets in the Southern Hemisphere into a separate company.

“There will be Kent and then we will have Australia and New Zealand under a new umbrella company held by shareholders in Kent,” Graeme O’Neill, Kent’s president, explained in an interview. “There are quite a number of companies starting to look at New Zealand.”

Kent’s foray into New Zealand and Australia coincided with the global financial crisis as many mining companies started offloading assets.

“Back in October and November when the world was crashing around our ears we looked at things and decided that there was an opportunity to get very, very, good people and very, very, good projects mainly because they would come free as companies downsized,” O’Neill said. “So we got vey good projects at a very inexpensive price.”

In February the Vancouver-based junior entered into an option agreement with CanAlaska Uranium (CVV-V, CVVUF-O) to earn a 70% interest in the 14,000-hectare Reefton gold project in the historic Reefton gold fields – one of New Zealand’s three main gold districts.

Historic reports indicate that since gold was first discovered in the district in the late 1800s, about 10 million ounces of placer gold and 2 million ounces of lode gold have been recovered from the Reefton gold camps. Oceana Gold (OGD-A) is currently operating a mine there producing about 50,000 ounces of gold a year on the northern edge of the Reefton gold project.

Now the junior has acquired the prospecting permit for the Alexander River gold project about 25 km southeast of Reefton on the west coast of New Zealand’s south island. The 2,669 hectare prospect lies in the southern portion of the prolific Reefton Gold Field.

The Alexander River prospect was home to the historic Alexander gold mine that reportedly produced 41,091 ounces of gold from 47,726 tonnes of quartz. It was shut down in 1943 due to labour shortages. Oceana Gold’s precursor company, Macraes Mining, rehabilitated the Alexander gold mine’s number six-level adit, mapped and sampled the underground workings, and drilled seven underground holes between 1993 and 1996. Of those holes, one reportedly intersected a 9-meter zone of 3.85 grams gold per tonne, which included 5.4 meters of 5.3 grams gold per tonne, and one which intersected 1.9 meters of 9.8 grams gold per tonne.

Macraes reported that an auriferous halo of sulphide-hosted mineralization existed around the early mined reefs, and that there was an inferred resource of roughly four million tonnes grading more than 5 grams gold per tonne or 643,000 ounces of gold, in a shallow dipping structure from surface to the Level 6 workings.

Kent plans to conduct a geological mapping and sampling program at the Alexander River mine later this year to see if they can identify targets for their 2010 drill program.

About 20 km north of the Alexander River prospect, Oceana Gold is open cut mining its Globe Progress mine, which produced about 640,000 ounces from underground workings before it was converted into an open pit mine with an estimated resource of 1 million ounces.

The Globe Progress mine started production in 2007 and recently Oceana Gold applied to extend the boundaries of the mine’s permitted area. The western boundary of the extension is close to the northeastern boundary of the company’s Reefton gold project.

In addition to New Zealand, Kent Exploration is also interested in Australia, where it signed an option agreement with Teck Australia in May to earn 100% of Teck’s interest in Chalice Gold‘s (CHN-A) Gnaweeda gold project in Western Australia.

“Teck — which was also in significant trouble with the takeover of Fording — started to offload assets and they looked at our beefed up technical team and thought there was a fit there,” O’Neill said.

The Gnaweeda project consists of more than 190 sq km of tenements covering part of the Gnaweeda greenstone belt in the Murchison region, 30 km east of Meekatharra in Western Australia.

Historical exploration defined significant gold and arsenic anomalous zone, over 15 km long and up to 750 metres wide, within a package of mafic and felsic rocks.

At presstime Kent Exploration was trading at 11¢ per share and has a 52-week trading range of 3¢-17¢ per share. The junior has 24.8 million shares outstanding.