Provenance Gold Corp. (CSE: PAU) (OTCQB: PVGDF) has signed a binding option to purchase the Eldorado Property in eastern Oregon from Nevada Select Royalty, Inc.
Nevada Select is an arms-length subsidiary of Gold Royalty Corp, a leading growth and Americas-focused precious metals royalty company.
Provenance has completed the first year’s payment of the option to purchase. The Eldorado Property hosts a significant historical gold resource in eastern Oregon. The project area is located on top of a large gold placer area and is located in the mining friendly part of the state.
The Eldorado property was first explored in 1980 by Westley Mines. Exploration continued intermittently up until 1998 by Degerstrom, Ican Minerals, Billiton Minerals and lastly North Limited. There has been no work done on the property since 1998. Previous work on the property included 236 reverse circulation holes and 6 core holes for a total of 21,866.9 meters of drilling, including trenching, soil sampling, metallurgy, geophysics, and resource modelling.
Assay intervals from selected core holes show the overall tenor of the deposit, for example:
| Hole | Width | g/t Au | From | To |
| R96-C1 | 185m (607 ft) | 1.57 g/t (.046 oz/t) | 21m | 206m |
| RA-136 | 101m (331 ft) | 2.02 g/t (.063 oz/t) | 55m | 156m |
| RA-90 | 69m (226 ft) | 3.05 g/t (.095 oz/t) | 0m | 69m |
| RA-152 | 55m (180 ft) | 2.33 g/t (.072 oz/t) | 41m | 96m |
Mineralisation remains open to depth and peripheral extensions of the deposit.
The project hosts three different historical resource estimates done by reputable engineering firms based in Denver. The first was done by Billiton Minerals USA after 150 holes had been drilled. Billiton estimated an open-ended resource of 776,000 ounces contained in 36,000,000 tons at 0.75 grams per ton (0.0219 ounces per ton) gold. The second resource estimate was calculated by Ican Minerals after they completed an additional 49 drill holes.
Their resource estimate was 1,860,000 ounces contained in 90,000,000 tons at 0.76 grams per ton (0.022 ounces per ton) gold. Ican then subsequently projected the resource to contain 4,000,000 ounces of gold at an average grade of 0.76 grams per ton gold (0.022 ounces per ton) gold.
Provenance believes the shallow gold resource would be amenable to open-pit mining and anticipates this acquisition will place the Company on a substantially more advanced footing.
CEO, Rauno Perttu, said the company plans to move the project forward as quickly as possible with confirmation drilling beginning within the first quarter of 2022.
“We have three exceptional Nevada projects that we will continue to advance, but this acquisition is significant for our Company. My site inspection made it clear the property is very open-ended. I am an Oregon registered engineering geologist familiar with both the improving positive regulatory climate in that part of Oregon and with Oregon geology. I was reassured by a veteran Oregon regulator that this project is very feasible,” Mr Perttu said.
“I personally am excited about this project because, while I believe that with continued drilling, our Nevada projects will advance significantly and become large deposits of their own, this is already a major deposit, with average grades higher than many current open-pit gold operations.
“ I am pleased that Nevada Select Royalties allowed us to undertake this opportunity, which they said was awarded to us because of our excellent track record in advancing the White Rock project that we acquired from them earlier.
“An exciting bonus of the Eldorado acquisition is that the historic drilling intersected several high-grade zones and our inspection found untested diatreme-like brecciation in the mineralised core area. The boiling zones of diatremes are excellent places to explore for high-grade gold, and we already have a major deposit drilled prior to our continued work.”
For further information please visit: https://www.provenancegold.com/
