Great Western Mining signs up James Blight as exploration manager

Nevada-focussed gold, silver and copper explorer and developer Great Western Mining announced the appointment of James Blight as its exploration manager on Monday.

The AIM-traded firm said Dr Blight would join on 29 November, and within his first week would travel to its operations in Nevada to review the proposed 2022 work programme, including further drilling and ongoing plans for the reprocessing of spoil heaps and tailings.

It said Dr Blight is a chartered professional affiliated with the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy, with relevant experience in vein-hosted gold and base-metals exploration, and is a ‘qualified person' for reporting purposes.

His career previously included frontier and near-mine exploration, resource interpretation, infill drill programmes, pre-feasibility studies and the assessment of mined materials for potential reprocessing operations.

Great Western said Dr Blight had worked on projects in West Africa, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, the Gobi Desert in Mongolia, and peri-arctic Sweden.

At Jibal Qutman in Saudi Arabia, he identified and sampled the Red Hill gold target, which became a 40,000 ounce satellite deposit.

Most recently, he had worked with Cornwall Resources, where he was the technical lead at the Redmoor Project, discovering a new tungsten-tin-copper resource.

Following that, he designed a second drill campaign which succeeded in more than doubling the originally-estimated tonnage at better-than-expected grades.

“We are pleased to welcome James Blight to this senior position in our team and look forward to working with him,” said executive chairman Brian Hall.

“He joins us at a time when we are hard at work on our large portfolio of projects in Nevada with the ultimate aim of making a major discovery and the experience he brings should help us to achieve this objective.

“Our successful drilling campaign at the Olympic Gold Project and the Rock House Group earlier this year will be followed up with further drilling in early 2022.”

Hall said the company was currently advancing work on other claim groups, including multiple surveys at Mineral Jackpot, the East Mine Group and in the Huntoon Valley.

“The prospective scope of our commercial development of pre-mined material is continually expanding and we are looking forward to updating shareholders on this.

“We have made significant progress in the last two years since we prioritised the hunt for precious metals and with a strengthened team we look forward to an exciting year in 2022.”

At 1229 GMT, shares in Great Western Mining Corporation were down 6.77% at 0.12p.