Transcription of The Stock Network Interview with Pantoro Gold (ASX:PNR), Managing Director Paul Cmrlec
Lel Smiits: Pantoro Gold continues to advance its wholly owned Norseman Gold project in Western Australia with a major high-grade discovery at racetrack, expanding underground operations and a strong balance sheet supporting growth. Ahead of appearing at the Noosa Mining Conference, I’m joined by Managing Director Paul Smerlak to discuss the significance of the recent high-grade racetrack discovery and how Pantoro is expanding Norseman through underground mines and operational growth. Paul, welcome back to the Stock Network.
Paul Cmrlec: Hello, great to see you again.
Lel Smits: Great to have you on and look keen to understand more about the significance of your recent racetrack discovery. You recently announced the high-grade racetrack discovery which is just 600 metres from the OK underground mine with drilling highlighting this really strong potential, also mineralisation still open.
Can you outline, Paul, what does this discovery mean for Norseman’s production outlook? Also, what are the next steps here?
Paul Cmrlec: Yeah, sure, so I think the discovery at racetrack is something our geologists are really excited about and it’s really a product of that big growth program that we’ve had in place over the last couple of years now, so it’s great to be seeing the success there. We’re back in there for another round of drilling at the moment actually and over the next few months we’ll get some much better definition over that high-grade area and start to step it out a little bit as well. In terms of what it means for us, I think it gives us another independent production area that we can access via the OK mine, so there’s very little capital infrastructure required for us to get out to that ore body and we can mine that as an independent ore body and directly add to the production profile for the operation overall.
So, pretty exciting development. We’re throwing multiple drill rigs at it at the moment and we’ll move to get it to being a mining proposition as soon as we can.
Lel Smits: Fantastic. Now, Pantoro is also advancing a third underground mine and multiple growth projects across Norseman. How do these developments support your production growth strategy, really looking over the next few years?
Paul Cmrlec: For sure. So, I guess we started just over a year ago now, rehabilitating that bull and mine to access the main field and the main field is really central to our immediate growth planning.
It’s produced more than half of the 6 million ounces of gold that have come out of Norseman historically and getting to the stage where we can kick the first of those mining areas off in the coming year is a great milestone. I think that you’ve seen pretty difficult operating conditions with personnel availability over the year and so some of the production challenges we’ve seen have been very much offset by the success of our growth drilling program and I think that program to get additional underground mines in place and ultimately really grow the production profile out of Norseman is in a really good state and we’ll continue to drill in that main field in multiple targets and I think there’s a very good chance that over the next few years we see two or three or four or even more additional areas being mined in that main field area. Outside of that, we’ve also been actively drilling beneath the Princess Royal open pits that we mined earlier in the year.
I think we’ll have results out on that before too long as well so that overall transition to a high-grade underground strategy is shaping up nicely.
Lel Smits: Great to hear Paul, appreciate the update from Pantoro and also look forward to hearing more at the Noosa Mining Conference.
Paul Cmrlec: Great, thanks very much Lel, good to see you again and we’ll see you in Noosa.
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