As part of its medium-term development plan, Integra is aiming to make further discoveries within its tenements capable of increasing the resource base to establish a second mining operation.
A key focus for future exploration initiatives will be the Aldiss Project, which contains over 80km of relatively unexplored greenstone belt.
The Aldiss Project already hosts resources of 500,000 ounces, which means that the discovery of only a moderate additional deposit could justify the development of a standalone operation in this area.
Integra has been working with the Australian Commonwealth Scientific & Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) to define key targets at the Aldiss Project, using a 3D wire mesh model of the geology which is deformed according to the deformation history of the Archaean rocks.
This process has enabled Integra to predict the known gold deposits at Main Zone, Harry’s Hill and French Kiss, greatly assisting in future exploration targeting in this region.
During 2010, Integra drilled 1194 reconnaissance aircore drill holes for approximately 60,000 metres on notional 320 metre spaced lines with 80 metre spaced drill collars. The region has a very complex regolith cover and gold anomalism is not expected to be as widespread as in areas with well developed and stable weathering profiles and the tenor of anomalism is expected to be lower. Despite the wide spacing of the reconnaissance aircore drill programme, the return of 10% of the holes with anomalous results of 0.1g/t gold or greater is considered to be particularly encouraging.
The forward programme for this area which commenced in June 2011 is follow-up aircore drilling of priority 1 anomalies and subsequent reverse circulation (RC) drilling of selected targets.