New Found Gold said Wednesday it was doubling an ongoing campaign to 200,000m at Queensway in Newfoundland after recent good results, increasing the number of rigs on site from four to eight by next month. The company has about C$67 million in its treasury to fund the planned $35 million programme.
"With this increase in the drill count we can now accelerate our grid drilling programme. Both [the Appleton Fault Zone and JBP Fault Zone] are highly prospective for gold with multiple showings that require systematic drilling," said CEO Craig Roberts.
New Found Gold completed its initial public offering in August last year amid heightened investor interest in the project's greenfields discovery potential.
O3 Mining is resuming a 150,000m programme with 12 rigs at Val-d'Or in Quebec.
Four rigs are active at Malartic, which hosts the Marban gold project next to Canada's largest openpit gold mine, Canadian Malartic, for 45,000m of planned drilling. Eight rigs will focus on the nearby Alpha property for 100,000m of drilling.
The Marban drilling will test for extensions to deposits included in the September preliminary economic assessment to try to grow the resource base. Other targets include posible extensions of historically mineralised zones within 3km of the PEA pit shells.
At Alpha, O3 aims to expand the Bulldog deposit at depth and laterally, explore depth extensions of Orenada #2, and Orenada #4 down to 800m vertically, and follow up on promising intercepts at Simkar, among other priorities.
O3 will also test several targets generated from a combination of in-house data compilation and an artificial intelligence targeting study conducted by Mira Geoscience.
"We are aiming to rapidly add to our resource base and extend the mineralised footprint of both properties into new areas to make these projects some of the most attractive, and likely to be developed and exploited in the province," said O3 CEO Jose Vizquerra.
Shares in New Found Gold (TSXV:NFG) climbed 6.5% in Toronto on Wednesday to C$4.39, capitalising it at $611 million, while those of O3 Mining (TSX:OIII) closed 2.4% lower at $3.20, capitalising the company at $193 million.
