Giants Reef

Nick Byrne likes rocks. From the thrill of the hunt to the
ultimate prize of discovering a workable mineral deposit.
He is the major shareholder in Giants Reef Mining NL.
He tells of their plans ...

We don't know how big the Billy Boy deposit will be but we've certainly got a mineable deposit already. It's got every chance of being another White Devil or Nobles Nob or Peko.
It is good news for the town what with Normandy pulling out, or working their way towards pulling out - but we're not.
We're increasing our position here and we're going to continue aggressively to pick up more ground and get into production.
We're trying to get into production with Edna Beryl in the June quarter and with good fortune we should be able to have Billy Boy in production at the end of this year.
That'll be pretty exciting.
In the meantime we are assembling bits and pieces for a small mill for Edna Beryl, then while Edna Beryl's in production, we'll upgrade it for Billy Boy, which is a more complex ore. Billy Boy has copper, gold and bismuth, whereas Edna Beryl's just straight gold, just free milling gold - lovely stuff.
We'll be processing at the old TC8 mine site out beyond Brown Street, we'll have a central milling facility where all of our discoveries in the field will be processed.
Everything will be carted there, because it's more environmentally benign to have only one mill. That way we'll have one controlled tailings repository - the environmental impact is not in the mining, it's what you do with your waste products.
So TC8 is well positioned, it's got good secure approved tailings dams on granted mining leases, it's got power, water, workshops and phones.
We can establish a mill for a very modest amount - $500, 000 and we'll be in production. We'll have local people assembling the mill and also the carting of the ore from the mine site to the processing plant.
As far as future exploration is concerned the present situation in the Territory is that no tenements are being granted on pastoral leases until the Native Title issue is resolved.
The Territory government has passed some legislation but there also has to be federal enabling legislation pass through both houses of parliament in Canberra.
This hasn't yet been passed, and until that happens, nothing can take place on pastoral land in the Territory.
But we've got plenty of ground to work on and it's not delaying us in any way but there is some ground we'd like granted in due course.
We've got about four and a half thousand square kms under application, quite a bit of that, 2,000 square kms would be on Aboriginal freehold, that is Aboriginal freehold under the Federal Land Rights Act.
Access to that or the grant of that is done through negotiating with the Land Councils on the behalf of the traditional owners, if consent is given by the Territory Minister for mines to negotiate an agreement, there is due process which takes place, similar to what we did with the Edna Beryl negotiations.
Land owners have the right to say yes or no to the exploration and mining. That's part of the legislation and we accept that.
At the completion of a mining operation there's always a provision for rehabilitation.
Exploration is not particularly invasive or destructive and even the mining, while it makes a hole in ground only affects a very small area.
If you're into mining, your mining lease title covers all aspects of development and rehabilitation.
Most open-cut pits are left open but our mining plans to date are all for underground mines, which just has a two metre by 1.5 metre orifice with a head frame to haul the ore to the surface.
As the milling will all be done by TC8, with already approved tailings dams, we won't be having any real environmental impact on the area - certainly no great detrimental environmental impact.
Edna Beryl is underground, as are all the mines we have in mind today; we're looking at another one, Estralita East and that too will be underground.
We don't know about Billy Boy, but it's very large and will probably be underground similar to White Devil or Nobles Nob before it became an open pit mine.
Our observations are that the mineral occurrences in Tennant Creek, aren't related only to magnetic ironstones. Nobles Nob, was a non-magnetic or a very weakly magnetic ironstone, but with a strong gravity signature, and that was two million tonnes averaging 16 grams. Whereas Juno, another glorious mine was just a straight magnetic anomaly and the gold was in the magnetic ironstone.
The reason this was the last goldfield found in Australia was that they didn't look at the ironstone. They used to look for quartz and quartz outcrops because that's where where the gold occurred in Ballarat and Bendigo.
So it wasn't until the 1930s that the commercial gold was found, and it was associated with the ironstone.
I think it really came on when an aboriginal bloke called Frank, brought a piece into the Telegraph Station, and it had copper and gold in the ironstone. I think it was in the late 1920s.
People had a go, but I don't think it was commercial until 1932 or 1933, when the first commercial gold was sold here.
Then they followed only the ironstones. Ironstones are more easily found by magnetics if they're not outcropping.
The first magnetic survey in the field was flown in 1939. They weren't clear and sophisticated results like we have today, but they were still effective and still showed some very good anomalies.
Our exploration targets are magnetic ironstone - we still look for those, non-magnetic ironstones and sheer zones that might be mineralised.
In fact anywhere, where it could occur - where there have been enough structures to allow the fluids to arrive and minerals to precipitate out.
We also use soil sampling which is a reasonably effective way of having a regional look at a relatively modest cost.
Not that the samples are cheap - they're about $18 per sample but you can put in long lines - over which you would be doing the geo-physical work anyway. Along these lines we take samples every 25m after removing the surface soils. The reason we do that is because of the wind blown material in the field and therefore you have contamination if you take surface samples.
We then send these samples to a laboratory and then they put that into chemicals that will readily dissolve gold and other minerals and then the fluid is assayed then they send you a list. You tell the laboratory the minerals you want assayed.
Interestingly, we've found, even though we're looking for gold and other minerals, but with soil sampling, we don't actually assay for gold, we go for what they call pathfinder minerals, bismuth, copper and silver.
Particularly bismuth,# it seems to be a rather good indicator if there's mineralisation in the area, whereas quite often even though we've found gold subsequently, it hasn't shown up at all in the soils.
Because of the expense, if it's not going to show you even when there's gold there and we did soil sampling right over the end of Edna Beryl mine, it didn't show any gold and yet we knew the gold mine was there.
It just means that because it's in small amounts, you're not necessarily picking it up.
You may pick it up, but for Ganymede and Callisto which had the gold when we drilled it, particularly Ganymede, the soil sampling that we did registered as a copper anomaly.
But when we drilled it there was also high grade gold there.
We have found that it's not necessary to assay for gold.
We use soil sampling to enable us to cover regional areas without great expense. If any anomalies are found the geologists just goes out in the field and determines is there's something there that's causing it like an outcrop. This happened in the case of Ganymede, and if there is an anomaly and there's no outcrop we take more soil samples to try and pinpoint what the source of the anomaly is.
We then do shallow drilling under the anomaly to see if there's any mineralised rock there.
And if there is mineralisation, we then bring in a bigger rig, and do some proper drilling like we're doing at Billy Boy now.
The percussion rig, which is a really big jack-hammer that blows the chips back up to the surface can drill to about 550 metres.
Every metre is bagged separately and recorded and given a sample number.
When it goes to the laboratory, they don't know where it comes from, they just have a number - they don't know if it's a drill hole or whatever.
From experience they would know its a drill chips, but its just a number and only the company can relate that to a particular drill hole or particular depth.
They fax us the preliminary results, then do check assays and then it's sent down the line and put into the computer. As we're drilling the geologist has a palm top computer with him/her and each metre is sieved and washed and the rocks# identified and keyed into the computer.
Then each night that's downloaded to the main computer here, so when the assays come they just download it and then the assays go along those metreages so you have your geology straight away then your assays for that same hole.
From that your draw your maps with sections with mineralisation shown on them.
To keep track of the actual position of the hole they have a directional camera that will tell you the dip and azimuth of the hole which is recorded on a film.
You take a shot, it's like a compass and it shows on the film.
It has a levelling device and gives you the position of all axis. This little device goes down the hole to record every 20 metres or so.
The success of our exploration techniques shows that Giants Reef is on the right track and we hope that this will lead to a renewed prosperity for Tennant Creek