Speaking via the Colorado conference's virtual presentation platform from Perth, WA, managing director Michael Fowler said the company's recent A$13.5 million acquisition of adjacent ground with past shallow mines and the "same rock types and structures that host Ulysses" in a "shear corridor" running down from the major Gwalia gold deposit north of Leonora and through the former Orient Well mine past Kookynie, gave Genesis a look at "a real mine camp" in a 15km-long stretch of the corridor.
The company has established a JORC mineral resource of 867,000oz (8.5 million tonnes grading 3.2gpt gold) down to about 450m depth at Ulysses and added 246,000oz (4.6Mt at 1.7gpt) at Admiral, Clark and Butterfly immediately south-east of Ulysses in the Kookynie deal. With Orient Well and other small deposits it has 1.28Moz (17Mt at 2.34gpt) in its ‘Greater Ulysses' inventory to underpin a feasibility study to be finalised early next year.
"When we acquired the Ulysses deposit [in 2015] the resource stood at 125,000oz and the depth of drilling was about 70-80m below surface. The last bit of mining and drilling at Ulysses before the acquisition was in 2002, so the project sat dormant for a number of years," Fowler said.
"It's a similar scenario with Admiral, Clark, Butterfly and Orient Well … where the bulk of drilling and mining took place in the 1990s to early 2000s. The depth of drilling is very similar - in that 80-100m range.
"We expect to be able to take our geological knowledge that we have from Ulysses and apply it across this whole belt and we expect to see significant resource growth over the next couple of years."
Genesis, which has seen its market value climb to A$157 million since the start of April on a quadrupling of its share price, has about $24 million in the bank after recently raising $19.5 million to support the Kookynie deal.
"We're well-funded to complete the work program in terms of feasibility work and drilling that we have ongoing," Fowler said.
"We're targeting completion of the feasibility study in March 2021. We've also kicked off a very large [25,000m] RC and diamond drilling program designed to initially confirm and upgrade the openpit resource on the Kookynie tenements … and then [aim to] expand those resources at depth and along strike."
Genesis is assessing underground and openpit mining at Ulysses, where Fowler said a higher-grade component of 695,000oz at 4.5gpt in narrow (2-14m true width) standard WA goldfields dolerite/basalt-hosted altered shear zones was part of a "large mineralised system that stretches over 1.8km of strike".
"There's plenty of room still to grow this resource at depth and along strike," he said.
"The Admiral, Clark, Butterfly [about 4km east of Ulysses) and Orient Well [4km further east] deposits occur within the regional structural corridor that controls gold mineralisation in the district."
Genesis has finished confirmatory and started extension drilling at Admiral-Clark-Butterfly where old shallow pits and resources of about 246,000oz at 1.7gpt stretch over a 1.8km mineralised strike zone.
"The depth of drilling to date is less than 100m below surface, so we see a great opportunity to be able to expand these resources at depth and along strike to really increase the resource base here," Fowler said.
"What we're trying to do here is capture all these resources into one large openpit and we expect to be able to do that at the end of our six months drill program which will be looking to expand the current resources."
Orient Well was another area mined in the mid-1990s, with "no drilling completed since then", where again Genesis was assessing "a large mineralised system here stretching over about 1.8km of strike … completely open at depth".
Fowler said Genesis expected to post updated resources for Admiral, Clarke, Butterfly - including the large, Archduke oxide zone - and Orient Well "towards the end of the year".
