Reedy Lagoon unearths more gold in WA Wheatbelt

Junior multi-commodity explorer Reedy Lagoon has been again rewarded for its exploration in WA’s Wheatbelt, with soil sampling returning more gold anomalies at the company’s Burracoppin project.

The finds include a new area of interest and follows last year’s discovery of gold anomalies in soil samples at Burracoppin’s Windmills and Lady Janet prospects.

The latest finds include a new area of gold anomalies and the market appeared to approve of the news with Reedy’s share price rising 35 per cent to an intraday high of 0.019.

The Burracoppin gold project sits south of the Great Eastern Highway and is roughly equidistant between Perth and Kalgoorlie.

The company’s interest in gold exploration in the same area was prompted by the gold-bearing Yandina shear zone that runs through its leases and there are historic mines in the area, including the Lady Janet mine.

There are also gold deposits to the north and south, however management says there has been very little recent or past exploration for gold across the 240 square kilometres of its Burracoppin tenure because early prospectors homed in on high land, rather than flat land lacking outcrops that wheat farmers prefer.

Indeed, most of the Burracoppin project is on land being cropped, though some is native bush.

Reedy says samples show the significance and economics of modern geochemical processes that allow gold anomalies to be detected cheaply and to minute levels — as tiny as one part per billion, equivalent to one-ten-thousandth of a gram.

At Windmills, geochemical data on a traverse over sandy soils in an area devoid of any known past sampling identified an auriferous zone 800m wide.

The latest samples, taken between January and April this year, showed anomalous gold 600m to the south and along trend from the discovery traverse.

Anomalous gold was also found south of Windmills on two so-called “scout” traverses, 800m apart.

Though the assay results for the most parts returned relatively low levels of gold in – 83 per cent of samples returned gold at two parts per billion, or “ppb”, or less – five samples returned greater than 5 ppb, with the highest coming in at 26.7 ppb.

Reedy believes the real significance is that anomalies have been identified and so can be further investigated to produce specific drilling targets.

Interestingly, more than 700 soil samples are yet to be tested. Those results are expected before the end of August and the company will be examining them carefully for even more gold anomalies.

However, whatever the results, further soil sampling is probable before any decision is made on drilling.

Reedy has plans for infill and extension sampling at identified anomalies, systematic soil sampling for geochemical data and additional exploratory traverses in untested areas.

Besides gold, the company has its fingers in a couple of other interesting pies, including magnetite.

It aims to establish a magnetite resource at Burracoppin and then a mine to produce iron concentrate for smelting into pig iron.

Most recent focus on the company, however, has centred on its two lithium projects in Nevada, USA, that aim to capitalise on the burgeoning electric vehicle market.

Reedy’s plan is to locate and then extract the sought-after metal from lithium-bearing salt ground water using new processing technologies. It would then sell directly to lithium-ion battery manufacturers as a low-cost producer.

Conveniently, just down the road from its Nevada projects is a lithium brine operation owned by Albermarle Corp – and a Tesla factory making lithium-ion batteries just 360km away.

Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@wanews.com.au