Australian gold explorer Nusantara has delivered a maiden Measured Resource for its Indonesia-based Awak Mas gold project following a close-spaced diamond drilling program.

The drilling identified a 2.2 million tonne resource with a grading of 1.58 grams per tonne for 0.11 million oz of contained gold.

In addition to staking out the Measured Resource, the close space drilling also upgraded the average grade of the indicated resource by 4% – bringing it to to 36.5Mt at 1.41g/t gold. 

The company’s managing director Neil Whitaker said the results were “a great success” for the business.

“The high confidence Measured Resources de-risk early production and can be used to better define individual mining areas,” he said. 

“We can proceed with conviction from the grade uplift we have seen in areas of greater data density, especially where there are potentially more high-grade feeder structures to identify.”

The results place the business on-track to define high confidence Resources over all of the initial mining areas within the Awak Mas project site, for the first two years of production.

And Nusantara is still waiting on the results of other testing – specifically assay results from its Salu Bulo deposit – before updating its current resource.

Nusantara’s Measured Resource can potentially be converted to a ‘Proven Ore Reserve’ – an estimated quantity of gold which the company is confident it can economically dig out of the ground – in the future.

In mining industry jargon, ‘measured’ refers to the peak level of confidence in a mine’s mineral resource estimates; with ‘Indicated’ and ‘Inferred’ used to describe less confident estimates.

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Reach Markets have been engaged by NUS to assist with private investor management.

Sources:

• Nusantara defines maiden Measured gold resource at Awak Mas
• ASX announcement – 16 March 2021
• What the JORC? Why miners use strange jargon and what it really means