Sub Nigel

The Sub Nigel Project is a brown fields gold project located within the southeastern portion of the East Rand Basin, between the towns of Nigel and Heidelberg, in the Gauteng Province of South Africa. Previously, Gold One through its subsidiary Goliath Gold, held Prospecting Rights over the Vlakfontein, West Vlakfontein, Spaarwater, and Wit Nigel tenements, but in 2019 these Rights were incorporated into the Sub Nigel Mining Right via a Section 102 process. The main target reef is the Main/Nigel Reef, although further to the west, there is also potential on the Kimberly and BPM reefs.

The target areas are not connected to the flooded East Rand Basin as they are to the southeast of the historically extensively mined East Rand area and only limited and very localised mined areas exist. Since this area is very distal from the East Rand Basin’s gold inflow point, the Main Reef tends to be highly channelised, with large barren areas interspersed with areas where payable gold is deposited in a very channelised fashion as well as some high-grade erosion type channel deposits such as the Spaarwater, Poortjie and Houtpoort Erosion Channels.

The current project is an exploration project targeting the possible extension of the historically mined Spaarwater Erosion Channel towards the eastern boundary of the East Rand Basin. The historical Spaarwater Erosion Channel mining produced about 2.6 million tons at a recovered grade of 10.38g/t for 852 000 ounces. The mining on the eastern side of the Channel stopped against substantial faulting and no efforts were made to determine if there was further reef contiguity on the other side of this faulting, as at that time, the major mining houses in the area were focusing their attention on the developing Free State Gold Field.

In 2022 Sub Nigel executed a preliminary exploration program which consisted of a fence line of six borehole with deflections located to the east of the eastern end of the Spaarwater Erosion Channel and at right angles to the channel direction. Two payable intersections were achieved, one of which was significantly high value. It is now proposed to drill additional exploration holes either side of the high-grade intersection to try and firm up on the possible extent of payable section and to determine if this could be an extension to the Spaarwater Erosion Channel.