Shore Gold Completes Orion South Core and Large Diameter Drilling Programs

(IDEX Online News) – Shore Gold has completed both the core and large diameter drilling (LDD) programs on the Orion South kimberlites at the Star-Orion South diamond project ahead of schedule.

The core drilling program included 18 vertical NQ (48 millimeter) diamond drill holes totaling 3,617 meters that intersected 1,208 meters of Early Joli Fou (EJF) and Pense kimberlite, confirming significant new intersections of kimberlite on the western flank and southern part of the kimberlite.

The LDD program included twelve 24-inch holes totaling 2,559.9 meters that sampled a total of 1,027.48 meters of EJF and Pense kimberlite units within the OS kimberlite. A total of 439 wet recovered tons of kimberlite, in 97 samples, was collected from the 12 LDD holes.

The samples are being shipped to Rio Tinto Canada Diamond Exploration Inc’s Thunder Bay Mineral Processing Laboratory.

The LDD program aims to estimate macro-diamond grade information from strategically located drill holes. This diamond grade estimation will then be used to re-estimate the mineral resources on the kimberlite.

“The LDD program has been completed ahead of the original schedule and more than three quarters of the samples have already been shipped to the Thunder Bay Mineral Processing Laboratory where processing has commenced,” said George Read, senior vice president of exploration and development.

“The company plans to re-optimize the open pit on Orion South using the updated mineral resource estimate and updated diamond prices. Thereafter, we aim to optimize the existing feasibility study with a revised mine plan, where Orion South is mined first. Preliminary calculations suggest that such an optimized feasibility study, with a new mine plan, can positively change the economic model for the project by increasing the mineral resource estimate and decreasing the pre-production capital costs and the time to achieve diamond production.”