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S2 Resources has begun a maiden drilling program at its Greater Fosterville project
\nThe Mark Bennett-led explorer won the Victorian Government tender for the 394km2 tenement surrounding Agnico Eagle\u2019s Fosterville gold mine in 2021
\nCan it find a repeat of Fosterville\u2019s famous ~50g\/t Swan Zone?<\/p>\n
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In 2019 the Victorian Government began a process that would draw the eyeballs of miners large and small to a state that had long shed its golden past.<\/p>\n
It was prospectors with pickaxes, dryblowers and gold pans who flooded the State from every corner of the world in the 1850s.<\/p>\n
This gold rush was conducted on pen, paper and computer screens, with heritage consultants, board directors, community relations people, engineers and geologists alike among the actors.<\/p>\n
Time had run out for Kirkland Lake, then owner of the Fosterville gold mine near Bendigo, to make a discovery on tenements it held around the famous gold mine, where only four years before the revelation of the near 50g\/t Swan Zone had made it Australia\u2019s most profitable bullion producer.<\/p>\n
The ground release of four exploration blocks, including a 394km2 tenement literally surrounding the underground mine and its 750,000tpa processing plant, drew applications from as many as 60 companies, among them global giants like Newmont and Kirkland themselves.<\/p>\n
Kirkland, now world\u2019s third biggest gold miner, Agnico Eagle, after a merger between the Canadian majors last year, won three blocks, where it has pledged to spend $90 million looking for a repeat of Fosterville\u2019s Swan and Phoenix Zones.<\/p>\n
But none were the coveted Block 4 \u2014 the prized exploration ground so close you can taunt Fosterville\u2019s security metres from its mine office.<\/p>\n
The winner of that one was S2 Resources (ASX:S2R)<\/a>, then worth less than $50 million.<\/p>\n S2 founder and executive chairman Mark Bennett, a geo famed for his role in the discovery of the Nova nickel, Thunderbox gold and Wahgnion gold mines with Sirius Resources, LionOre and Western Mining Corporation, said calling it a surprise was an understatement.<\/p>\n \u201cWe put in proposals for three blocks out of the four and we thought we might have a small chance with two of them, but we\u2019d never have a chance with this one,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cAs we\u2019d done most of the legwork for the bids on the other blocks anyway, it wasn\u2019t a lot extra to put in a third bid.\u201d<\/p>\n The $10.4 million S2 pledged to spend over five years paled in comparison to the roughly $60m believed to have been promised by some of the gold sector\u2019s biggest players.<\/p>\n \u201cWe put in the bid for it, and pretty well forgot about it because it took quite a while to get resolved,\u201d Bennett said.<\/p>\n \u201cWhen Marcus Staubmann, one of our guys, received a phone call one Thursday night, didn\u2019t recognise the number, thought about just ignoring it but picked it up at the last minute.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd it was the Victorian Department saying we\u2019d won a block in the tender. I think he said \u2018what tender\u2019 and then when they said which block it was he sort of nearly fell off his chair, as did the rest of us.\u201d<\/p>\n Two years on, S2 has just kicked off a maiden 5600m drill program chasing the next Swan. Eleven years after Bennett defied expectation to make the Nova discovery, can lightning strike again for the legendary mine finder?<\/p>\n READ: The Explorers: S2 Resources\u2019 Mark Bennett on the secret recipe to finding big deposits<\/a><\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n S2\u2019s share rerated around 90% the day the Fosterville tender win was announced on October 29, 2021.<\/p>\n They drifted as gold lost its lustre with investors, but have surged again by almost 31% over the past six months as momentum built towards the start of exploration at Greater Fosterville.<\/p>\n After a near two-year wait, drill rigs have hit the ground at Greater Fosterville.<\/p>\n After sinking its first hole late last month at the licence known as EL7795, S2 is still early in the roadside campaign, with core currently being cut and prepped for delivery to assay labs.<\/p>\n The size of the prize is, potentially, massive. S2, previously focused on nickel and gold exploration in WA and Finland, now surrounds a mine which in its pomp produced 640,000oz at over 33g\/t in 2020 and counts as one of the two most profitable standalone gold mines in the world alongside Sumitomo\u2019s Hishikari mine in Japan.<\/p>\n This year it\u2019s forecast to produce 305,000oz at insanely low cash costs of US$378\/oz. But with an official mine life out to 2031, Agnico and its predecessors are yet to make a find to truly follow up the unique Swan Zone.<\/p>\n If S2 can make a discovery of note they are not only just paces from an active and underfed mill, but they could be attractive to a major gold miner in need of reserves.<\/p>\n They\u2019ve drafted a who\u2019s who of Victorian gold expertise to get there. Alongside Bennett is chief geologist Rohan Worland who, based out of Ballarat, has been around the Victorian gold scene for decades.<\/p>\n In consultant Rod Boucher, S2 also has access to one of the foremost experts on Victorian orogenic gold, who was part of a skeleton crew who built up the Fosterville resource ahead of its rebirth as an underground mine with the development of the Phoenix Zone in the mid-2000s.<\/p>\n They have a head start. S2 has a ream of geological data from Kirkland Lake and previous explorers, including gravity, induced polarisation (IP), electromagnetic (EM), seismic, magnetic and LIDAR surveys as well as drill results with shallow, localised gold hits and even a small historic non-JORC resource at Goornong South.<\/p>\n Along with drilling, Worland is hoping to conduct some IP surveys to determine the chargeability of prospects, which he says links well with the hinges where high grade mineralisation at Fosterville is commonly found.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve got 18km of strike from the boundary of the mining lease here, through to the north,\u201d he said during a trip to inspect the drilling this week.<\/p>\n \u201cEach of those structures has been poorly explored. And so, how do you systematically explore that?<\/p>\n \u201cWe think the chargeability in this setting is giving us a really good tool to define alteration on the fertile hinges.\u201d<\/p>\n S2\u2019s chief geologist Rohan Worland shows how close to the Fosterville mine S2 is. Pic: Josh Chiat\/Stockhead<\/p>\n Bennett said the data and knowledge already built up before S2 began work places it in a better position than his frontier exploration finds at Thunderbox and Nova, where Sirius was famously onto virtually the last drill hole it could afford when it made the discovery.<\/p>\n \u201cIn that case, it was a more of a normal exploration situation where you\u2019ve got limited data so you\u2019re still guessing quite a lot,\u201d he told Stockhead<\/em>.<\/p>\n \u201cWhereas in this case, we\u2019ve got all the information from the mine just to the south of us on what sort of controls where the gold is.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd we inherited all those drill holes, that we could relog structurally, it sort of launched us straight into a more advanced stage of exploration where you\u2019re actually quite data rich.<\/p>\n \u201cYou\u2019ve got a lot to get your teeth into which is why (the geos) are sort of getting into the detail.\u201d<\/p>\n Renowned Victorian geologist Rod Boucher is consulting on the Greater Fosterville project. Pic: Josh Chiat\/Stockhead<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n S2\u2019s Victorian pivot may be near on accidental but was fortuitous for another reason.<\/p>\n Headquartered in Perth, S2\u2019s Bennett was a long-time resident of WA.<\/p>\n His move to his current home outside Melbourne, like many stories in the current day and age, has its origins in the days of the Covid lockdowns, when he fell foul of WA Premier Mark McGowan\u2019s strict border controls.<\/p>\n \u201cI found an old place I was doing up and thought this would be nice to retire to one day in the future,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cI was over here one weekend doing that and that\u2019s when the borders closed.<\/p>\n \u201cI tried to get a G2G pass about eight times and each time got knocked back.<\/p>\n \u201cI live there, my house is there, my family\u2019s there, I work there, my company\u2019s there. And they said \u2018well, that\u2019s not good then\u2019.<\/p>\n \u201cI spent 12 months forcibly separated from the family.\u201d<\/p>\n The solution was for Bennett\u2019s family to pick up stumps and move to Victoria with the renowned geologist, who agreed to sign up also in October 2021 as the chairman of Chalice Mining\u2019s Vic gold spinout Falcon Metals.<\/p>\n Three days later S2 had its shock tender win. The company shifted focus immediately, with then CEO Matthew Keane later replaced with the newly Victorian exec chair Bennett as the day to day head honcho.<\/p>\n S2 field assistant Felicity Trew was one of just five undergraduates in her first year geology cohort in Ballarat. There are around three times that in the newest cohort, a sign of the reemergence of Victorian exploration. Pic: Josh Chiat\/Stockhead<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n The surprise award of Block 4 to S2 rose the eyebrows of many market watchers, suspicious of the Victorian Government\u2019s bureaucratic approach to the mining industry.<\/p>\n To many it beggared belief the owner of the Fosterville mine would have tenure where mineralisation could logically run from its own workings stripped off it, but also to miss out on the right to reclaim the ground position.<\/p>\n Bennett looks at it another way, pointing out that the Victorian Government was acting strictly within the bounds of its own legislation, which only allows a second five-year renewal in exceptional circumstances.<\/p>\n Drilling started at Greater Fosterville in late October. A mobile shed and, where not possible, hay bales are used to mute the noise for nearby farmers. Pic: Josh Chiat\/Stockhead<\/p>\n It was a closed door process, meaning we may never know exactly why S2 was the preferred tender. And it wasn\u2019t all about how much was going to ploughed into the ground.<\/p>\n 25% of the weighting was placed on a vote from traditional owners. Here Bennett thinks the human touch of a junior was an important factor.<\/p>\n At Sirius, which was bought by battery metals giant IGO (ASX:IGO)<\/a> in 2015 in a deal that helped solidify not only Bennett\u2019s but also billionaire prospector and backer Mark Creasy\u2019s legacy, Bennett spearheaded a landmark native title agreement with the Ngadju people of WA\u2019s southern Goldfields.<\/p>\n \u201cI think that was taken into account quite a lot and it wasn\u2019t just the work we did, it was the way we did it, in terms of the relationships we developed with individuals with the Ngadju,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n \u201cSlightly quirky things, like I\u2019m a sort of frustrated muso and I played bass with the Yabu Band supporting Gurrumul on Australia Day, for example.<\/p>\n \u201cSo it\u2019s when you get sort of face to face contact with people, rather than just speaking the corporate speak that I think shows that you actually do what you say.\u201d<\/p>\n Completing agreements with traditional owners of the Dja Dja Wurrung and Taungurung people on whose cultural lands the ground sits contributed to a near two-year delay between S2 receiving the right to apply for the ground and having it granted. But the process also won S2 plaudits, earning the AMEC Award for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Empowerment at a ceremony in Perth last night.<\/p>\n Now that it is granted, there\u2019s little doubt that high grade gold straight off the bat would be a nice bonus. But the structural information Sirius will glean from the 5600m, 10 hole diamond drilling campaign seems to excite its geos more.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve got to be disciplined, finding the ballpark before looking for the ball,\u201d Bennett said.<\/p>\n \u201cThe swan zone is a sort of relatively small sub zone of everything that\u2019s at Fosterville. And you need to find those broader mineralised zones, these sort of south plunging zones first, before you drill within them and find the ultra sweet spot, like a Swan Zone.<\/p>\n \u201cSo what we\u2019re trying to do with this drilling is basically find the ballpark.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019ve got some ideas, we\u2019ve got a head start from the drilling that\u2019s previously been done. So basically, we\u2019re just trying to put together where we think the anticlines are, and you want to be in one of those, and where the faults are.<\/p>\n \u201cAnd we might hit a fault outside of an anticline, it might be an insignificant thing. But knowing what it is, you can then sort of track it into the anticline, which is where it\u2019ll become much better.<\/p>\n \u201cSo it\u2019s a systematic hole by hole, putting together the jigsaw.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n <\/span>\u00a0 The post Can legendary mine finder Mark Bennett hit the jackpot next to Australia\u2019s most profitable gold mine?<\/a> appeared first on Stockhead<\/a>.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Rigs hit the ground<\/h2>\n
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