ECR Minerals (LSE:ECR) rose on Tuesday (27 August) after revealing that its new approach to sampling for gold at the Creswick project had far yielded positive and upgraded results.
Following a technical review earlier this year, the business confirmed that the Victoria-based project’s mineralisation is ‘nuggety’ in nature. This meant that the firm’s assay results to date from the project, which were completed using ‘part-of-bag’ sampling techniques, may have understated its gold potential considerably.
To rectify this, ECR devised a new ‘whole-of-bag’ sampling technique called gravity concentration that it has now begun reapplying to all of the samples it has collected to date. At the time, the organisation’s chief executive Craig Brown said that this new approach could be ‘company transformational’, leading ECR’s share to soar to 1.23p.
In Tuesday’s update, ECR said that, following delays stemming from poor winter weather in Victoria, it has now established a testing process fully. This uses the dual methods of gravity and chargeability and is capable of removing coarse, fine and ultrafine particles of gold from the RC samples. ECR said that, while the process adds time to the testing period for each bag, it is essential for reliable data collection.
The process is now beginning to yield results from samples taken from the quartz zones around the higher grade results from holes CSR006 and CSR012 and a single bag from CSR010. The CSR006 sample from 15-16 m has been upgraded from 44.63 g/t to 63.03 g/t. Of this gold, 50pc was in the tails indicating there is a significant component of very fine gold with the nuggets) Meanwhile, ECR said it recorded further gold content upgrades in most bags processed along with downgrades in three packs.
In the video below from Visual News Services, Brown explains why he is confident that ECR’s new sampling method will continue to yield gold upgrades at Creswick over coming months
