Neometals fires up fast gold play at Barrambie as shallow ounces and old pits promise quick cash without the plant pain

With multi-style mineralisation, legacy workings and shallow high-grade hits, Neometals’ Barrambie Gold Project is shaping into a textbook short-cycle gold play.

Better known for battery tech, Neometals Ltd is now drilling for gold—and doing it with technical intent.

At the RIU Sydney Resources Round-up 2025, managing director Chris Reed unveiled the company’s strategy to unlock shallow, high-grade ounces at the Barrambie Gold Project in Western Australia’s Murchison, leveraging historic data, structural geology and old approvals to fast-track development.

“We’re just going back looking for gold in the shadow of the old head frames,” Reed told delegates. “It’s very shallow. It’ll be a very easy open-pit operation”.

Greenstone and Structure

The 505-square-kilometre project area covers ~40km of strike along the underexplored Barrambie Greenstone Belt, part of the northern Yilgarn. It hosts Archean mafic and ultramafic sequences intruded by the Barrambie Sill—described by Neometals as a fertile host rock featuring multiple mineralising events.

Gold mineralisation occurs in quartz stockworks, high-grade vein systems, and shear-hosted lodes, with styles and lithologies varying across the Sugarstone and Barrambie Ranges centres.

“We’ve got quartz high-grade quartz veins, quartz stockworks, multiple mineralising events in multiple host rocks,” Reed said. “It’s a fertile belt with multiple structures and fluid pathways”.

Walk-Up Open Pit

Within the northern Sugarstone Centre lies the Ironclad Prospect, the most advanced of several gold targets. It sits along a kilometre-scale corridor bounded by standout historic intercepts:

• 13m @ 13.43g/t Au from 7m

• 25m @ 4.30g/t Au from 22m

• 32m @ 3.41g/t Au from 19m

• 1m @ 18.85g/t Au from 111m (2025 RC hole)

Most mineralisation sits in saprolite—oxidised, weathered rock that’s soft and easily mined—enabling free-dig open pit extraction.

“A lot of the mineralisation is soft, shallow and high-grade—ideal for a low-strip open pit,” Reed said. “The 1988 pit design is still valid. We’ll just dust it off and press go”.

Corridor Connections

The broader Sugarstone Centre includes the Mystery Prospect, ~1km north of Ironclad along a structurally complex corridor. Neometals believes this link zone, where structures converge, could yield enhanced widths and grades.

Drilling to date has been mostly shallow—90 percent of historic holes are <60m deep—leaving scope for down-plunge extensions and new lodes.

Combined with the southern Barrambie Ranges centre, the company has defined a camp-scale exploration target of:

8–10.5 Mt at 1.3–2.3 g/t Au, for 335,000–775,000 oz Au

Simple Development Plan

Neometals isn’t chasing a standalone mill. Instead, it aims to monetise ounces through ore sales or toll treatment—leveraging proximity to third-party processing plants.

The 1988 Notice of Intent for Ironclad included proposed pit designs, dumps and tailings areas—still valid, saving time on approvals.

“We just want to take out a couple of little open pits and sell the ore,” said Reed. “We want to get to FID early in the second half of next calendar year”.

The strategy:
Drill → Define → Design → Dig → Deliver

Data, Gaps and Upside

More than 2,000 historic drillholes (57,000m of data) and 8,000 surface samples have been compiled—but key structures remain underexplored due to limited depth and patchy soil coverage (<25 percent effective).

“We’ve barely scratched the surface by WA standards,” Reed said. “There are five kilometres of prospective contact with no holes on it. We feel like a kid in a candy store”.

Lean and Tactical

For geology and operations professionals, Barrambie is a technician’s gold play:

• Multi-style mineralisation in structurally complex terrain

• Saprolite-hosted gold ideal for low-cost, short-term mining

• Legacy approvals and existing pit designs streamline execution

• Drill-supported strategy with resource definition underway

As Reed summed it up: “While we’re running the battery materials business through this lull, we’re looking to generate our own cash flow by monetising our gold resources.”