Our portfolio of 31 Gold Projects was the basis of the Barrick Gold Country-Wide Alliance and our first-mover advantage has secured Newmont Corporation as a significant shareholder, validating our thesis that there are major gold deposits yet to be discovered in Japan.
The Japan Gold Barrick Alliance was formed in February 2020 and the Barrick Alliance portfolio increased 42% since its formation to cover more prospective ground.
Barrick has solely funded an initial evaluation of 29 projects from the Japan Gold portfolio. The Japan Gold team has completed an enormous amount of work over the past 2 ½ years evaluating the 29 Barrick Alliance projects in order to demonstrate high quality of the Japan Gold project portfolio and its prospectivity. It’s highly encouraging that Barrick has selected 6 projects with the potential to host Tier 1 or Tier 2 ore bodies and we look forward to aggressively advancing these projects.
With the thorough evaluations completed by the Barrick Alliance, the Company now holds a comprehensive and unique data set on Japan’s epithermal-gold districts and is well-positioned to advance areas of high-prospectivity which don’t fit Barrick’s criteria but may still host large high-grade gold deposits. The Company is internally evaluating all projects that Barrick did not select, which remain at an early stage of investigation but offer exploration potential, with a view to determining which to advance independently or by bringing in additional partners.
In addition to the 29 projects under our strategic alliance with Barrick, Japan Gold is also developing the Ikutahara Project in the northern island of Hokkaido and the Ohra-Takamine Project in the southern island of Kyushu.
Recent drilling at the Ryuo prospect within the Ikutahara Project has intersected high-grade veins including 20m @6.3 g/t gold and 0.45 m @ 1,395 g/t gold which confirm high-grade vein mineralization is continuous below historical workings closed in 1943.