Flagship Minerals managing director Paul Lock said: “Flagship’s strategy is to define sufficient mineral resources that will support considerations for project development consisting of open-pit mining and heap leach processing, with an aim to produce 100,000 ounces of gold per year for more than 10 years. The leaching testwork results further confirm Pantanillo’s credentials as a large, scalable heap leach opportunity with substantial strike and down dip extension potential.”
Pantanillo sits at the heart of the Maricunga gold belt, a region rich with multi-million-ounce gold deposits. The belt features more than 65 million ounces of gold, anchored by Newmont-Barrick’s 27-million-ounce Norte Abierto mine 40km southwest of Pantanillo. Kinross’s 10.7-million-ounce Maricunga project lies 25km west, and Hochschild’s 11-million-ounce Volcan deposit is just 10km northwest of Flagship’s project.
The 110-square-kilometre project area holds an array of geophysical targets linked to magnetite and pyrite that light up under magnetics.
Recent drilling of priority targets unearthed girthy intercepts such as 116m at 1.5g/t gold and 493m at 0.53g/t from 9m. The results highlight Pantanillo’s shallow scale for bulk-tonnage open-pit mining.
With gold prices soaring past $5500 an ounce, Flagship is moving to rapidly cash in on a red-hot market, touting 100,000 ounces per year production targets for Pantillo, which it acquired less than six months ago.
Flagship is leveraging its Anglo-American dataset, acquired for US$2.85 million, to fast-track the development, while it explores targets such as Pantanillo Central and T1 for broader resource growth potential. It says large alteration zones northwest of the resource and geophysical anomalies southeast signal substantial gold upside.
If Flagship confirms a low-cost heap leach operation for Pantanillo and a fresh one-million-ounce JORC-compliant resource, it could race into feasibility studies for a project that could deliver stellar economics in a booming gold market.
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