Newcrest Mining Ltd (ASX:NCM) is taking on a stake in a joint venture in Papua New Guinea by entering into a deal with Triple Plate Junction Plc.
Newcrest Mining is Australia’s largest gold mining company. Triple Plate Junction Plc is a Vietnamese gold and mineral exploration company.
Triple Plate Junction is willing to give Newcrest Mining the majority stake in its gold prospect. Other partners in the joint venture include Pacrim Energy Limited and Golden Success Limited. By spending $6 million over the next five years Newcrest Mining would earn itself 60.78 % of the joint venture.
This deal is conditional upon at least $1 million being spent in the first two years on exploration activities by Newcrest Mining. The agreement is non binding. The companies are still negotiating definitive agreements about the Joint Venture which the Melbourne based Newcrest Mining would manage.
Additional approvals from the Papua New Guinea government will also be required for the joint venture project which is located on Manus Island on a 674 square kilometre tenement.
The Manus Island project comprises Exploration Licences 1326 and 1473. A number of mineralized centres have been recognized over a 30 kilometre long NW-SE corridor. Some highlights of the geological prospectivity within this corridor are:
- Previous exploration had concentrated on Miocene aged gold and molybdenumrich porphyry copper deposits at Arie and Mt Kren. TPJ’s re-interpretation of
induced polarization (IP) geophysics carried out previously at Mt Kren shows the top of a significant anomaly at 175 metre depth with E-W dimension of around 500 metres on the eastern edge of known mineralization. This anomaly needs to be tested by drilling;
- New age-dating that assigns a younger early Pliocene age to rocks surrounding a remnant strato-volcanic complex, together with widespread recordings of
tellurium mineralization, has given added impetus to the possibility of telluriumrich gold targets within the licences. An extensive silica-alunite alteration cap at the Njekel prospect remains untested for any underlying mineralization;
- TPJ has focused its exploration work on the Kisi epithermal gold occurrence, which is complicated by swamp, gold-bearing colluvials and volcanic cover, but
where a gold-in-soil anomaly of +0.5 parts per million extending some 2 kilometres by 1 kilometre has been delineated, and surface trench sampling of
the intermittently exposed Kisi vein has returned some high gold values including 16 metres at 40 grammes per tonne gold;
- Limited scout diamond drilling by TPJ at Kisi has intersected a series of goldbearing veins as silica replacement of limestone beneath andesitic volcanic
cover. Best drill-hole intersection from a three-hole programme to date has been 5.8 metres at 4.98 grammes per tonne gold from 116.4 metres hole depth.