Southern Gold awarded geothermal acreage

www.energycurrent.com
7/6/2009

North Adelaide, South Australia: Southern Gold Ltd, has been granted a suite of 18 new geothermal exploration licenses (GELs) in South Australia, increasing Southern Gold's Roxby geothermal project (RGP) acreage by 500% and providing a "dominant hot rocks energy opportunity" in an area acknowledged as one of the state's main mining, mineral exploration and electricity grid corridors.

Southern Gold had previously held only four non-contiguous granted GELs in an area directly west of Lake Torrens. The additional licenses, which were awarded today, give the company a total of 22 granted GELs covering an area of 10,000 square kilometers (3,861 square miles).

The company recently established a large estimated inferred geothermal resource of 260,000 petajoules within GEL302, a tenement in the southeastern area of Southern Gold's RGP holdings and representing just five% of the total project's now granted geothermal footprint.

"With today's approvals securing an uninterrupted geothermal access opportunity and with a large inferred resource confirmed, the heat flows measured by Southern Gold on the Roxby Geothermal Project provide a strong basis to progress investigations towards the commercial development of an Engineering Geothermal System (EGS)," said Stephen Biggins, managing director.