Australian miner striking gold in southern Ghana

VIKING Ashanti has increased its gold resource by 40 per cent at its wholly-owned Akoase East gold project in southern Ghana.
The Perth-based company, which was established in 2007 to develop and mine mineral deposits in West Africa, last month announced an updated JORC classified inferred resource estimate of 18 million tonnes grading 1.2 grams per tonne of gold for 704,000 ounces of contained gold, at a 0.5g/t gold cut-off. This latest resource estimate is based on 10,000m of historical reverse circulation data, plus data from about 8000m of RC drilling and 3000m of diamond drilling completed by Viking during the past 18 months.
Viking managing director Peter McMickan said the new resource  estimate gave the company increased confidence that the Akoase East deposit had the potential to grow well beyond 1 million ounces.
“We also have a clear geological understanding of how we can continue to increase this resource through additional drilling to the northeast and at depth, which we will be actively progressing over the coming months,”  he said.
The Akoase project, about 125km north-northwest of Accra, covers 106 square kilometres in the northern part of the Ashanti gold belt and was discovered in the late 1990s. The updated resource model has outlined multiple sub-parallel zones of mineralisation over a strike length of 3km from surface to an average depth of 120m.
The resource model has also confirmed that the higher-grade mineralisation is best developed in the previously unexplored Alimac prospect, where the thickest and highest-grade drill intercepts have recently been reported. The Akoase East deposit remains open at depth and along strike to the northeast.