OceanaGold books high-grade gold in South Carolina

New high-grade drill results from OceanaGold’s (TSX: OGC; US-OTC: OCANF) Haile mine in South Carolina show the company is making headway towards a goal of expanding the resource at its top producing asset.

Hole DDH1281 in the mine’s Ledbetter zone cut a highlight result of 8.7 metres grading 22.3 grams gold per tonne from 376 metres depth, OceanaGold said Thursday in a statement. Another hole in the same zone, DH1279, cut 28.9 metres at 18.33 grams gold from 489 metres downhole.

Armed with a record $10 million (C$13.8 million) exploration budget for 2025, Vancouver-based OceanaGold has stepped up drilling at Haile, the only U.S. gold mine located east of the Mississippi River. An ongoing cutback of the open pit should result in the mine generating about half of the company’s output next year, up from around 38% this year, according to CEO Gerard Bond.

“The biggest single change in our near-term gold profile comes out of Haile,” Bond said in an interview last month. “This year we are doing a large cutback of the [Ledbetter] open pit. It gives us access to ore that’s higher grade. I’m talking double the grade.”

An underground extension of the Ledbetter open pit, which the Vancouver-based company says would improve the site’s economics, is under consideration.

Rising output

Increased output at Haile – one of the company’s four operating mines – is a key reason why OceanaGold is forecasting a 20% increase in total gold output by the end of 2026. It produced 489,000 oz. of gold last year.

“The best place to find gold is within the shadow of the headframe of your existing mine. Haile is a proof point of that,” Bond said. “The best exploration targets are on land that you own and are near or truckable to an existing process plant. The capital cost to bring that ore into production is much lower.”

Drilling in another zone at Haile, called Horseshoe, also yielded high-grade intercepts. These included hole UGD0082, which cut 16.1 metres grading 16.33 grams gold from 274 metres depth, and hole UGD0086, which returned 22 metres at 8.6 grams gold from 259 metres downhole.

Crews have drilled 24 holes covering 7,467 metres at Horseshoe since February, and upcoming drilling will remain focused on further defining step-out targets to support future underground development, OceanaGold says. Results in the area demonstrate “the potential for continued resource growth,” the company adds.

New zones

OceanaGold has begun drilling in two new zones at the mine – Pisces, located 300 metres south of Horseshoe, and Clydesdale, which sits 100 metres northwest of the Palomino deposit. Hole DDH1271 cut 7.6 metres at 10.4 grams gold from 647 metres downhole, while hole DDH1282 at Clydesdale intersected 26.2 metres at 4.11 grams from 781 metres depth, the company said Thursday.

Follow-up drilling at Clydesdale is ongoing. Two additional holes will be completed by year-end for a total of 1,800 metres, the company says.

OceanaGold shares were little changed at C$28.27 in early afternoon trading Thursday in Toronto, giving the miner a market value of about C$6.5 billion. The stock has traded between C$10.11 and C$28.32 in the past year.