Resource World Magazine

a u stralian upd ate Novo Resources exploring Witwatersrand lookalike by Greg Barns While many juniors in the gold sector are toughing it out, Novo Resources Corp. [NVO-CNSX; NSRPF-OTCQX] has recently been in the news for all the right reasons. In September Newmont Mining [NEM-NYSE] became a shareholder, and there is positive news about its flagship Beatons Creek Project in Western Australia. Novo Resources is what you might call a Western Australian specialist. It is focusing exclusively on the Pilbara – a region better known for its vast deposits of iron ore.  Novo has three plays which comprise its Beatons Creek Project which has an inferred resource of 421,000 ounces of gold grading 1.47 g/t. Company management thinks the Pilbara is promising country for gold in part because the rocks of the Hamersley Basin in the Pilbara share many similarities with those of the Witwatesrand Basin in South Africa, host to the largest gold field on Earth. Novo has a joint venture and farm-in with Millennium Minerals [MOY-ASX] to earn 70% interests in three mining leases covering the Beatons Creek conglomerates.  The second element of the Beatons Creek Project is a joint venture and farm-in agreement with the privately owned Creasy Group.  Novo is looking to earn a 70% interest in the prospecting, exploration and mining leases in the Creasy Group's Marble Bar Project and a 554 km2 area at Beatons Creek. The third area making up the package is the Grant's Hill tenement which was purchased for $60,000 from Welcome Stranger Mining. An October 2 press release, on drilling just completed at the Marble Bar and Beatons Creek areas, makes for interesting reading. Novo Resources has undertaken about 1,500 metres of RC drilling at Beatons Creek over the Australian winter (June-August) and most of it was north of the resource area.  Results included 0.75 metres of 25.72 g/t gold; 2.30 metres of 12.41 g/t; 0.15 metres of 94.39 g/t; 16.00 metres of 1.39 g/t and 27.45 metres of 1.54 g/t. At Marble Bar, according to the company, rock chip sampling in one area has revealed what appears to be the first laterally continuous gold-bearing reef in the basin. The Beatons Creek Project attracted Newmont Mining with that company's Canadian subsidiary acquiring a 35.7% interest in Novo Resources when it acquired ownership of 17.76 million shares in September via agreements to buy the stock of two existing shareholders. Novo President and CEO, Dr. Quinton Hennigh, sees Newmont's investment in his company as an endorsement of the Pilbara strategy.  The deal saw $4.8 million in cash injected into the Novo bank account through the exercise of 8,000,000 warrants, and in November another 6,681,200 warrants will be exercised which will allow the company to aggressively pursue its drilling and development in 2014. Hennigh, in an interview in May of this year, summed up the Novo Resources Pilbara strategy this way; "The project is something akin to a coal seam, and these rocks could project outwards… My queasy gizzard is feeling better about suggesting this could underlie tens of square kilometres… It sounds absurd, but this could be the beginnings of a major gold discovery." So far Hennigh's 'queasy gizzard' seems to be on the money. n november 2013 www.resourceworld.com 49

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