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GREAT BOULDER RESOURCES LTD (GBR) - Beyond the Surface: The Hidden Value of Side Well Gold Project

• Andrew Musgrave

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Gold explorers often make big promises, but Great Boulder Resources is quietly delivering real results at its flagship Side Well Gold Project near Meekatharra in Western Australia's gold-rich Murchison region. Managing Director Andrew Paterson shares how they've built a substantial high-grade resource in just four years, with clear pathways to reach one million ounces this year and ambitious plans for 1.5 million ounces in the medium term.

The company's approach blends methodical resource definition with strategic exploration across multiple prospects. Already boasting two-thirds of a million ounces at an impressive 2.8 grams per tonne, Side Well's growth story continues with recent drilling success at Eagle Hawk and Side Well South. Patterson details how they've expanded the already profitable Ironbark deposit, where high-grade gold averaging 3.3g/t extends from surface and continues southward with impressive new intersections between six and nine grams per tonne.

What makes Side Well particularly compelling is how each technical hurdle has become an opportunity. When the Ironbark extension was discovered beneath the Goldfields Highway, Paterson's team developed multiple pathways forward – either realigning the road for an expanded open pit or considering underground mining to access the high-grade ore. Similarly, concerns about copper affecting gold recovery were comprehensively addressed through metallurgical testing, revealing ore characteristics that make Side Well's material attractive even as toll-treated feed.

Perhaps most exciting is the discovery of a previously unrecognized corridor between the main mineralised trends, identified through IP surveys and about to be drill-tested. With $12 million in the bank and a balanced approach to both resource growth and new discoveries, Great Boulder Resources represents that rare combination in junior exploration – a company with proven resources, clear development pathways, and substantial blue-sky potential still to be unlocked. Follow our journey as we continue transforming Side Well into Western Australia's next significant gold development.

 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Welcome back to ASX Briefs, where we dive into the strategies and stories behind Australia's most promising listed companies. And today we're joined by Andrew Paterson, the Managing Director of Great Boulder Resources, a gold and base metals explorer with a strong focus on the Murchison area of Western Australia, including its flagship project Side Well, which is an emerging, high-grade, large-scale gold system. Andrew, thanks for joining me today and welcome to the ASX Briefs podcast. 

Andrew Paterson Guest

Yeah, thanks for your time. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Now for investors that may be unfamiliar with Great Boulder Resources can you just provide a brief overview of the company? 

Andrew Paterson Guest

Yeah, exactly. So, our typical elevator pitch, if you like, is Great Boulder is a gold-focused explorer. Our flagship asset is right next to Meekatharra in the Murchison gold fields of Western Australia, so it's really a single asset focus, and we've been busy there for a little over four years, in which time we've defined so far two-thirds of a million ounces fairly high grade resource there 2.8 grams per tonne of gold and we're pushing hard to get that resource up to 1 million ounces this year. Now that's all contained within a JORC compliant exploration target, and beyond that, though, we have ambitions to grow to about 1.5 million ounces in total at the Side Well Gold Project there at Meekatharra. And then consider the whole of project development. Whether that includes building our own infrastructure or not, we're yet to discover, but really, it's all about growth. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Now looking at your projects. Side Well is now recognised as a high-grade, multi-prospect gold system, with resource growth ongoing at Eagle Hawk and Side Well South. How close are you to a significant uplift in this resource? 

Andrew Paterson Guest

We're actually pretty close because the resource that we quote today is one that we published at the end of 2023. So, throughout 2024, we did a lot of infill drilling, particularly at Mulga Bill. We made the discovery of Side Well South. We defined a smaller resource down at Saltbush. So, these things Saltbush and Mulga Bill and the other deposit, Ironbark are all fairly mature in a drilling sense. So, a lot of the effort in the last six months has been defining Eagle Hawk, which is pretty much the northern extension of Mulga Bill, so that's a large system on its own of about 2.5 kilometres length. And then Side Well South, which is newer. We've done some of the confirmation drilling there earlier this year and we're now drilling that out with RC. So, as we sit here today, there's actually not that much more drilling required to define all those areas. That's five prospects into resource by the end of this year. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Okay, and the Ironbark scoping study points to a highly profitable open pit opportunity. So, given the continued success in expanding mineralisation to the south, how do you see this influencing the scale or phasing of the Ironbark development? 

Andrew Paterson Guest

Yeah, this is a really interesting question. So, the scoping study is obviously done on the existing resource, which was just shy of 600 metres long. That's 100,000 ounces basically from surface. Average resource grade 3.3 grams per tonne. So, it's a really nice grade and certainly in that location, being so close to surface, it's a real obvious open pit mining target. The interesting thing now is we've extended that mineralisation by at least 180 metres to the south and the intersections there are really quite high grade, so a lot of them between six and nine grams per tonne at around five, six, seven metres thick, and so that opens up a whole, well, a couple of opportunities, the most obvious one being to expand the open pittable resource to the south. 

It does go under the Goldfields Highway, which is the dirt road between Meekatharra and Wiluna, which is a fairly low traffic piece of dirt road, but it is also a state highway, so we need to deal with that. We can either get it realigned and mine a larger pit. The other opportunity there perhaps, which we will be considering, is underground mining, because there's certainly the grade to support that without disturbing the surface infrastructure and there are certainly comparisons where companies have done that, most recently, I think, Genesis, also on the Goldfields Highway between Leonora and Kalgoorlie. So yeah, it can be done. 

What we're doing at the moment is pushing the approvals well towards approvals for an open pit, as outlined in the scoping study, without disturbing the highway alignment, because that's the easiest path forward. But in the longer term we will consider whether we should be looking at relocating or mining underneath. So yeah, I guess it's a good problem to have always, you know, finding more high-grade gold, and in fact Ironbark remains open to the south. So further drilling will determine or will examine whether that continues and whether it plunges in higher grades at depth. So quite an interesting little deposit there. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Okay, and your metallurgical work on Mulga Bill has shown high recoveries even at low cyanide concentrations and coarse grind sizes. So how do these findings shape your thinking around processing route and environmental footprint? 

Andrew Paterson Guest

Yeah. So, this is really interesting because Mulga Bill and Eagle Hawk is an intrusive, related gold system, which means what we've ended up with there is a somewhat polymetallic deposit, by which I mean we have gold, obviously, but also accompanying that things like silver, some pathfinders like bismuth and moly molybdenum, but also copper. And copper can be a warning sign in gold deposits because if you use conventional cyanide treatment and the copper is cyanide soluble, what happens is the cyanide will gobble up the copper preferentially and leave the gold behind, and so the solution goes out to tailings with the gold steel in it, which is obviously a bad result. So, the company and also analysts around the industry were all quite concerned about the metallurgy at Mulga Bill because of the copper. 

So we did some basic gravity recovery and cyanide leach tests and found to our relief and excitement that the level of cyanide soluble copper is actually very low and in fact it's a really fast leaching, relatively coarse, low cyanide product and so not only is it amenable to cyanide leaching but it's actually very attractive as a mill feed and could go through pretty much anyone's mill in the district because they all use a similar process. So, you know that's a big de-risking, a big part of the de-risking. A big box ticked. We've checked the metallurgy but yeah, it means that we could sell that ore, provided that it's economic, to mine Mulga Bill, and we'll be looking at that shortly. We could sell that ore to anyone and it would be a very attractive mill feed. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Okay, and just looking at other opportunities, the recent IP survey identified new chargeable targets, including a conceptual corridor between Mulga Bill and Ironbark, so can you walk us through the significance of this discovery and what the next steps look like? 

Andrew Paterson Guest

Yeah. So, this is really interesting. I mean it's kind of geo-nerdery, but basically, we had these two corridors of mineralisation Mulga Bill leading into Eagle Hawk If you can imagine they're both running north south and then about 1.4 kilometres to the east we had the corridor of mineralisation, including Ironbark, and they're in different geology. The intrusive-related stuff is in volcanic sediments and volcanic plastics. The Ironbark stuff is more stock standard goldfields, geology of basalts and ultramathics, so that they are different. But in between we had this unexplained gravity anomaly, a high-density area which was unexplained by the geology, which looked very similar to Mulga Bill, and we didn't have any drilling over that. 

We've now recently done fences of IP surveys, so that's induced polarization, which is basically looking for sulphides in the ground, and we've found some chargeable sulphide, well, possible sulphide anomalies that coincide with this unexplained gravity corridor in between. So, it's roughly halfway between the other two corridors and anything like that that you can't explain through geology and rock types is therefore an anomaly. So, it could be caused by mineralization, could be caused by mineralization, could be caused by alteration. Anything that changes the density introduces chargeability, like sulphides. 

It could be caused by carbon, for example, in a graphitic shale, which would be, we would regard as a false anomaly, and it can be caused by salt water, but the groundwater in the Meekatharra area is fresh, so we're pretty sure it's not that. We haven't seen any carbonaceous shales, so we're hoping that its sulphide related and we're drilling it in the next few days. So, in fact, any drill hits in there could produce new gold targets within a very short space of time. So that's potentially quite exciting. And to put that into context, as I said before, the five deposits we've been working on are heading towards our million-ounce resource target. So, all these new targets are kind of the next step from hopefully from the one-million-ounce point to our ambition of 1.5 million ounces, which is kind of where we're heading to in the medium term. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

Okay, and just touching on the financials, with circa $12 million in the bank and multiple rigs operating, how are you prioritising between resource growth, regional discovery and development studies over the next six to 12 months? 

Andrew Paterson Guest

Well, starting with development studies. We have that ticking away in the background. That's a relatively low-cost program. Things like geotechnical drilling, a bit more metallurgy, then the hydrogeology is pretty much done. The waste rock characterisation is almost complete. So, a few small parcels of work ticking along in the background under the care of consultants. 

While that's happening, though, we're roughly balancing the other two priorities of resources and discovery at approximately 50-50 on a metres drilled basis, which means that we're spending a little more money on the resource work because that's RC drilling, whereas the discovery is air core drilling, which is about a third of the cost approximately. And then later in the year we'll be drilling some deep holes under Mulga Bill, deep diamond holes. So that'll be quite interesting as well and that won't contribute to resources in the short term, but it will demonstrate, hopefully, the large-scale potential at Mulga Bill, which is you know, long, we know that and hopefully deep as well. So, you know that would really add some potential to the entire project, if we can define that so interesting times. We're always balancing these priorities as we go and the thing with discovery drilling is that one high-grade hit can kind of reprioritize an entire field budget fairly quickly. So, we always need to remain nimble while we're while we're doing it okay, andrew. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

OK Andrew, well, it's been great to chat today, so thanks for the update. Plenty going on at the company. We wish you the best and we look forward to further updates from Great Boulder Resources in the upcoming months. 

Andrew Paterson Guest

Yeah, there should be plenty of news flow and thanks for your time. Fantastic to chat. 

Andrew Musgrave Host

That concludes this episode of ASX Briefs. Don't forget to subscribe and we look forward to catching you on our next episode.