Tenements
In New Zealand, the development of our Coromandel tenements is a key focus for management as we continue to evaluate several exciting targets. In addition, finalising a Joint Venture for the Talisman Mine is key to proving up ore reserves from the existing resource and crystallising the value of that asset.
Exploring prime gold areas in New Zealand's Waihi district
The Waihi gold district lies 1.5 hours by road southeast of Auckland and is easily accessible. This is an area of world class epithermal gold occurrences.
The district hosts the Martha open pit mine, the largest gold and silver producing mine in New Zealand's history and the Favona underground mine. Both operations are owned and managed by Newmont Gold. The Martha open pit has produced over 7.5 million oz of gold and 54 million oz of silver and is expected to close in 2013. The adjacent Favona mine has a current, projected operating life of two years at an annual production of about 100,000 oz of gold.
The district hosts many historic gold mines, one of the more recent being the Golden Cross mine that produced 700,000 oz of gold.
Heritage has undertaken high-resolution airborne magnetic surveys, ground-based geophysical surveys and used other technologies to guide its drilling programmes. More drilling is planned.
Directly beneath the prominent peak of Mt Karangahake Heritage plans to further test the historic workings of the Talisman Mine with the objective of delineating a resource of up to 500,000 oz of gold (see Projects for more detail on our Talisman Mine prospect).
In the Karangahake area Heritage also holds the highly-prospective Rahu permit which is considered to be the northern extension of the Talisman vein system.
Heritage Gold tenements in the Waihi district of the Coromandel region include:
Karangahake Area
- Talisman mining permit (includes Dominion Knoll)
- Rahu exploration permit
Waihi Area
- Golden Valley exploration permit
Exploration Programme
- A deeper, in-fill drilling programme at Rahu is aimed at delineating a resource extension of the Talisman deposit.
Heritage is carrying out low detection level geochemical surveys and ground geophysical surveys at its Golden Valley permit which lies east of Newmont’s Martha and Favona mines at Waihi. The data collected from these surveys will be used to define drill targets for 2010.
Rahu