Central Gold Limited is a New Zealand mineral exploration company within the Hardie Pacific Group of Companies. The company is focused primarily on gold exploration, and also recognises the potential for other historically mined minerals, including antimony and tungsten.
Previous exploration across Central Otago has largely focused on individual alluvial mines and historic workings. Central Gold is taking a broader geoscientific approach to identify new gold discovery targets, as well as advancing exploration at several known prospects.
Central Gold’s exploration team and office are based in Dunedin, Otago, providing ready and close access to the goldfields. The local team predominately consist of Otago University graduates who bring extensive knowledge of exploring throughout the region.
The company has commenced an extensive regional exploration program, including geological mapping, soil and rock sampling, geophysics and remote sensing. This work is building a comprehensive understanding of the region’s geology and structures that control gold mineralisation.
Alongside its regional program, Central Gold is progressing several exploration prospects, drilling in the near future.
Central Gold holds approximately 2,500 km² of exploration permits across Central Otago, one of New Zealand’s most historically productive gold provinces. This footprint provides an opportunity to undertake coordinated regional studies across the Otago Schist Belt.
Through a sustained period of permit acquisition, Central Gold and its associated companies have strategically assembled Otago’s largest exploration permit portfolio, establishing a significant regional position with strong potential to support new gold discoveries. The portfolio covers much of the prospective ground between OceanaGold’s world-class mine in the east and Santana Minerals’ Bendigo-Ophir Project in the west.
This provides an opportunity to explore a substantial portion of the Central Otago Schist Belt at a regional scale. Integrating historical datasets with new geological mapping, geochemistry, geophysics, remote sensing, and ongoing targeted fieldwork.
Central Gold’s position presents an opportunity to investigate the potential for significant hard-rock gold deposits across a largely under-explored section of the Otago Schist Belt.
The scale and position of the portfolio, combined with the local team’s extensive knowledge of the region, provides a strong foundation for investigating this largely maiden ground within a major established producing gold province.
Our exploration strategy aims to identify large-scale geological structures and corridors that control gold mineralisation, enabling us to focus exploration on areas with the potential to host significant hard-rock gold deposits.
The Otago gold rush transformed the region. Dunedin became New Zealand’s largest urban centre, its financial capital and, by the 1880s, its richest city. Gold rush capital flowed into banking, shipping, manufacturing, infrastructure and the establishment of major New Zealand enterprises.
Understanding the potential source systems is fundamental to Central Gold’s exploration program. Erosion of near-surface gold-bearing reefs released gold into the surrounding drainage systems, resulting in rich alluvial gravel deposits that became the focus of the early gold rushes.
Mindful of the region’s distinctive landscape, Central Gold’s objective is to identify a subsurface gold deposit of sufficient grade and quality to support a potential underground mining operation with minimal surface disturbance.