LONDON (ShareCast) - (Sharecast News) - West Africa-focussed exploration company Oriole Resources updated the market on its 90%-owned district-scale licence package in central Cameroon on Thursday.
The AIM-traded firm said that, following the recent issue of the licences made to its subsidiary Oriole Cameroon and its partner Reservoir Minerals Cameroon, an independent desktop remote sensing study had now been completed over the entire 3,592 square kilometre licence package.

It said that work identified 12 initial priority gold targets, which would be given particular attention during its planned mapping and stream sediment sampling programmes later in the first half.

The company explained that preliminary geological, alteration and structural interpretations had been completed, with seven of the eight licences interpreted to cover primarily Paleo-Proterozoic and Pan-African terranes, both of which were prospective for orogenic gold.

Oriole said the eighth licence was covered by younger volcanic rocks, but the Proterozoic and Pan-African terranes were expected to be encountered at depth;

The board said the Tcholliré-Banyo shear zone had been interpreted to cross at least six of the licences, adding that it was believed to be one of the "significant" structural controls for gold and other mineralisation in the region.

It said the work had identified an initial 12 priority gold targets for follow-up, adding that a reconnaissance visit had been completed to complete initial ground-truthing of the targets and to inform the local authorities of its upcoming work programmes.

Confirmation of gold recovery from alluvial workings in the centre of the easternmost Ndom licence was also received.

"Whilst these 12 'first-pass' remote sensing targets look interesting from a desktop analysis point of view, we will also be carrying out a wider, district-scale stream sediment sampling programme and mapping, as the main part of the 2021 programme across the entire licence package," said chief executive officer Tim Livesey.

"From this work we expect to identify many more areas of interest for detailed follow up in later exploration phases.

"Throughout, we will continue to re-evaluate and re-prioritise our targets across this potential new gold exploration district as more data becomes available from the field programmes, ably led by Abdoul Mbodji, our West African exploration manager, and Claire Bay, our vice-president of exploration."

Livesey said the company already had encouraging indications from its team's initial reconnaissance visit on the licences last week, with evidence of alluvial gold in streams being identified.

"As the old adage goes, the best indicator for the presence of gold is gold itself, and so we are very happy to see evidence of this during such a brief field visit."

At 1445 GMT, shares in Oriole Resources were down 1.58% at 1.40p.

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