Castle ramps up Ghana gold hunt with 410-hole auger sampling program

Castle Minerals is intensifying exploration at its Kandia gold prospect in Ghana’s emerging Upper West gold region with a 410-hole power auger drilling campaign.

The program aims to extend known gold zones, including at Kandia’s 4000 and 8000 prospects, and test new priority targets identified through proprietary high-resolution aeromagnetic survey data.

The targets are associated with deeply penetrating regional-scale structures, known to host multi-million-ounce gold systems elsewhere in West Africa.

The campaign will span Castle’s licences in the Wa East region, covering large tracts of highly prospective Birimian-age terrane, a geological setting renowned for hosting major gold deposits.

These deposits often align with deep structures that channel gold-bearing fluids toward the surface. Using its aeromagnetic data, Castle has pinpointed where these structures intersect Birimian rocks and is ranking sites for potential near-surface gold anomalism.

Anomalies confirmed by auger drilling will be fast-tracked for earliest possible follow-up using reverse circulation drilling.

A key area of focus is the northern part of the Kandia licence, where the contact between Birimian metasediments and a granite intrusive trends northeast toward Azumah Resources’ Ghanaian Black Volta gold project, home to multi-million-ounce deposits on the border with Burkina Faso.

Previous reverse circulation drilling at Kandia’s 4000 and 8000 zones involved 11 holes for 1510 metres of drilling and was successful in extending gold mineralisation and confirming well-defined lodes to about 150m depth.

Notable results from that work included 5m at 1 gram per tonne (g/t) gold from 173m depth, 2m at 1.51g/t gold from 176m, 2m at 1.33g/t gold from 137m, 3m at 1.42g/t gold from 82m and a high-grade 1m at 9.91g/t gold from 50m.

A structural review by Castle has also identified additional untested targets along the granite-metasediment contact.

Castle is also advancing its Kpali gold, 100 kilometres southwest of Kandia, employing its aeromagnetic data to design a targeted auger sampling campaign.

Located at the convergence of the Bole-Bolgatanga and Wa-Lawra greenstone belts, Kpali sits near the Ghana-Burkina Faso-Côte d’Ivoire border junction.

That location also places Kpali about 75km southwest of a cluster of gold projects in the adjacent nation of Burkina Faso, including AngloGold Ashanti’s 5.2-million-ounce Konkera-Batie West gold project as well as the Tonior gold project, owned by Jilbey Burkina, a subsidiary of Russia’s Nordgold.

The Kpali and the nearby Burkina Faso projects are hosted within extensive West African Birimian greenstones, but while they are not believed to lie along the same geological trend or structure, their geological commonalities reinforce the prospectivity of the vastly under-explored Birimian rocks in Castle’s Ghanaian ground.

The Birimian terrane extends well beyond Ghana to span Côte d’Ivoire, Guinea, Mali, and Burkina Faso. It is a powerhouse for gold mineralisation, hosting metamorphosed volcanic, sedimentary and plutonic rocks formed about 2.2 billion years ago.

Ghana’s northern region is relatively underexplored compared to the country’s better-known southern goldfields and is a hotbed for new discoveries, similar to Côte d’Ivoire’s thriving exploration scene.

This overall geological and structural context enhances Castle’s prospects for defining substantial, shallow-depth, bulk-tonnage gold mineralisation at Kpali and Kandia, particularly along the latter’s 16km southwest-trending sheared contact with a regional granodiorite intrusion.

Castle plans to undertake further reverse circulation drilling at Kandia next month to chase up significant anomalies defined by the auger program.

With its strategic focus on Ghana’s northern frontier and the richly endowed Birimian geology, Castle is well-positioned to unlock new gold discoveries in this underexplored region.

Castle’s aggressive exploration at Kandia and Kpali applies cutting-edge data to a world-class prospective geological setting, laying the groundwork for potential game-changing gold discoveries in Ghana’s Upper West region.

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