Canadian gold mining company Great Pacific Gold has secured an exploration licence for its Kesar Creek project from the Papua New Guinea Mineral Resources Authority.
The licence, which covers the whole of the Kesar Creek project, is valid for two years until October 2025.
The Kesar Creek project is located 10km along strike from K92’s Kora gold mine and is bounded by the Ramu Markham fault to the north. It consists of one exploration licence, EL 2711.
Great Pacific Gold CEO Bryan Slusarchuk said: “First of all, we would like to thank our project partner, geologist Andy Thomas, who did a significant amount of work securing the grant of the Kesar Creek exploration licence, concurrent with the support of the local landowners and communities.
“With the grant of the exploration licence, we are now in a position to carry out the necessary exploration work to define our lead drill targets. We look forward to building on the good work done to date at Kesar Creek, supported by the strong financial position of the company and a team with a track record of exploration success and discovery in-country.”
In September 2023, Great Pacific closed the acquisition of Wild Dog Resources, the owner of the Kesar Creek project and two other projects including Wild Dog and Arau in Papua New Guinea.
The exploration programme will include blanket soil geochemical work to further define target areas for an upcoming drilling programme.
The company claims that tests from the initial small-scale sampling programme at the project identified high-grade gold in veins in the same strike and orientation as those found at K92 Mining’s tenements.
This project has a presence of semi-massive copper-rich sulphide mineralisation associated with quartz veins along with a potential for copper-gold porphyry prospects within the tenement.
Although the project has seen only limited exploration, initial rock sampling returned a maximum of gold at 30.40 parts per million (ppm), silver at 240ppm, copper at 1,300ppm, lead at 66,000ppm and zinc at 47,500ppm.
