A Toronto-based mining company has unearthed a trove of gold in Western Australia, with the discovery of rocks containing 9,000 ounces of the mineral that’s estimated to be worth $15 million.
Shares of RNC Minerals soared on Monday, following the company’s announcement that it had mined the fortune in a single blast of a 130-tonne cut of rock at its Beta Hunt Mine. As of Tuesday morning, the company’s stock price was up more than 94 per cent on the Toronto Stock Exchange.
“It was really a once-in-a-lifetime discovery,” RNC President Mark Selby told CTV’s Your Morning on Wednesday. “It was an exciting time for our team.”
In the past week, the company has pulled out approximately 9,250 ounces of high-grade gold including a massive chunk of rock with an estimated gold content of 2,440 ounces. The second largest piece of rock they recovered contains an estimated 1,620 ounces of gold.
Selby said the first of the two boulders could be the “largest gold nugget” ever discovered.
For context, Selby said the average gold mine pulls in 1 gram of gold per tonne, which means they would have to move the equivalent of 300,000 tonnes of rock in order to pull out the same amount of gold that RNC found.
The Beta Hunt Mine has been up for sale since March. As a result of the lucrative discovery, RNC Minerals says they’re no longer in exclusive talks with a preferred bidder for the mine.
Selby said the company still has another two kilometres of area to explore at the Beta Hunt Mine where he’s hoping they will uncover even more gold.
“We always believed the mine had a lot of exploration potential and a bright future, we just weren’t able to raise the amount of capital to do this exploration,” he explained. “Obviously with this find going forward we won’t have any shortage of capital to make that happen and we think we’ll have a very long bright future to build a very big mine at Beta Hunt going forward.”
