It is hard to believe the historic Bellevue Gold Mine sat dormant for two decades.
The WA mine was closed in 1997 despite being one of Australia’s highest-grade gold mines in its heyday, producing 800,000oz at 15 g/t gold from 1986 to 1997.
Now “The Forgotten Treasure”, located in a major gold and nickel producing district near Leinster in the Goldfields, is once again proving to be one of the nation’s richest high-grade gold resources.
Since taking ownership in 2017, Bellevue Gold Limited (ASX:BGL) has undertaken a successful exploration program and is now moving towards early-stage development work to resurrect the mine.
Bellevue has appointed Macmahon company GBF Mining to complete stage one of development which includes the construction of a portal to access existing underground infrastructure.
Bellevue Gold managing director Steve Parsons has underpinned the rise of Bellevue Gold’s market capitalisation from $5m to more than $800m in just three years.
The company boasts a 2.3moz high grade resource in the Tier 1 jurisdiction of WA, including a maiden indicated resource of 860,000oz at 11.6g/t.
Speaking at a WA Mining Club function this week, Mr Parsons said after capital raising the company had $150m in the bank to “pursue a dual- track strategy’” of exploration as well as development.
“The $150m will certainly get us a long way through development, feasibility and getting us down to access a high grade of ore and … to being the next high- grade gold producers in WA.”
Mr Parsons said 28km of existing underground infrastructure, a legacy of the previous operation, would ‘’fast-track us into production’’.
“Being able to drill from underground is going to be much more cost-effective than from the surface,” he said.
The experienced geologist described the area as a “major mining district” with major players such as Northern Star, Gold Fields and Saracen operating mines within a 1500km radius.
Mr Parsons said the Bellevue mine closed down when a fault seemingly cut off mineralisation.
“Their thinking was the fault had taken mineralisation away and at that point it was owned by nickel companies and for 20 years not one drill hole was ever drilled to test that theory,” he said.
“So we were fortunate when we got the property in 2017 we took the theory that maybe this was wrong and maybe we should drill on the other side of this fault.
“Credit to the geological team who spent the first six months before even drilling a hole to really look at the geology and understand it and convince themselves that yes we should drill on the other side of the fault.”
Needless to say they proved the previous owner’s theory wrong and literally struck gold in their first drill program at Christmas 2017.
Since then three new discoveries have been made which are reflected in the current resource inventory of 2.3moz at 11.3 g/t of inferred category resources.
The moral of the story?
“Don’t be scared to drill holes,’’ Mr Parsons said.
“We have drilled over 200,000m of diamond drill core into the property and the resource has grown consistently and we expect it to continue to grow at that same rate of knots and the grade has been consistent throughout as well.’’
Bellevue is hoping to complete its surface and feasibility studies in the first quarter of 2021 when the company will get a full funding solution in place and build a processing plant.
Mr Parsons said they were hoping for “first gold” by early 2022.
He said the low community transmission of COVID-19 in WA would attract investors to the state as other Tier 1 mining jurisdictions around the world suffered from major disruptions to their supply chains.
“Investors are going to be putting their money into companies which can achieve resource growth,’’ he said.
“Here in WA with no community transmission it means we can operate really well and that means investors are going to be looking at places like WA, which is very blessed at the moment.”
The Bellevue Lode Systems form a continuous 4km mineralised system of high grade quartz lodes in a shear corridor within the Mount Goode Basalt. Mineralisation is shear controlled and associated with high pyrrhotite content, minor chalcopyrite and fine-grained visible gold.
Within the lode system, there are five currently known high grade lodes: Bellevue Lode, Deacon Lode, Tribune Lode, Viago Lode and the Southern Belle Lode. Currently, defined lodes are all located in the top 600m from surface and no drilling or testing has occurred below this horizon.
