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Rowena Duckworth
In the world of gold exploration, grades above 10 grams per tonne (g/t) are considered high grade, grades above 30g/t are exceptional and grades pushing past 100g/t – nearly three and a half ounces of gold in a single tonne of rock – are the kind of numbers that stop a room. Olympio Metals just reported all three.
Unsurprisingly, Olympio’s shares surged as much as 27 per cent in early trade, hitting 6.6 cents on the heaviest turnover the stock has seen in two months as the market digested the news.
The Perth-based explorer has received final assays from drill hole BO-26-63 – a hole number likely to be burned into management’s memory – at its Bousquet gold project in Quebec, Canada and the results are nothing short of eye-catching.
The standout drill hole returned a headline intercept of 19.40 metres at 17.29g/t gold from 172.5m depth, a substantial width at a grade that would certainly be turning heads across the gold sector.
‘This is an incredible set of results.’
Olympio Metals managing director Sean Delaney
Within that intercept sits a high-grade core of 7.5 metres running a superb 41.81g/t and nested inside that is a two-metre interval grading an eye-watering 109.51g/t – bonanza territory by any measure.
This intercept joins last week’s high of 41.81 g/t gold from 182 metres in the Olympio pool room. Visible gold seen in several previous drill holes adds a further degree of robustness to these assay results.
The Bousquet project sits on the Cadillac Break, one of the most significant and productive gold-hosting geological structures in the world. Stretching across the Archean Abitibi greenstone belt in Quebec, the Cadillac Break has produced more than 110 million ounces of gold over its long mining history.
Olympio’s ground is right in the thick of it, sitting within 15 kilometres of two substantial operating gold mines, Agnico Eagle’s La Ronde with a 15.8-million-ounce resource and Iamgold’s Westwood at 2.4 million ounces. This is serious gold country.
Significantly, drill hole BO-26-63 was drilled at a different orientation to previous holes; at 330 degrees azimuth rather than the 210 degrees used previously. This was a deliberate move to test for high-grade lodes running parallel to the known system.
The result has cracked open a new and important geological interpretation. Rather than hosting a single main lode at the Paquin prospect, the data now suggests multiple parallel high-grade lodes could be present – a material upgrade to the scale and potential of what Olympio could have on its hands.
Olympio Metals managing director Sean Delaney said: “This is an incredible set of results to complete the assays for hole BO-26-63 and it is rare to see an intercept with 19.4m at 17.29 g/t gold. Our aim now will be to determine the size and geometry of this gold lode and to test for similar lodes through further drilling at Paquin and throughout the Bousquet project.”
Gold is hosted in quartz veins and geologists have identified two distinct vein types in the drill core. The most exciting are the larger blue quartz veins, the same vein type associated with visible gold and the highest grades seen at Paquin. With their characteristic chlorite and sericite alteration, these blue quartz veins are the geological signature of the system’s richest shoots and they clearly appear to be delivering.
Olympio is now planning a downhole televiewer survey to better understand the structural orientation of the different lodes – critical information for designing the next round of drilling.
Meanwhile, assays are still pending for the remaining six holes from the phase two program, meaning the news flow from Bousquet is far from finished. Any one of those holes could add significantly to the picture.
For punters, the Bousquet story is starting to take shape as something genuinely exciting – bonanza grades, a world-class address on the Cadillac Break, multiple lodes potentially in play, and a busy pipeline of results still to come.
On one of the planet’s most celebrated gold belts, Olympio appears to have found something worth watching closely.
Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: mattbirney@bullsnbears.com.au
