Dacian (ASX: DCN) has been among the standout Australian gold-sector performers this year in terms of share-price gains – up 385% year-to-date as of the end of last week – as drilling on its flagship Laverton goldfield project has highlighted the potential for significant extensions of the high-grade (average plus-5gpt) resources the company has been building below the old Westralia openpit at Mount Morgans.

Last week Dacian posted an impressive 176% increase in the measured and indicated resources for Westralia, taking the total to 8.6 million tonnes at 5.8gpt (1.6 million ounces), at the same time lifting the average grade from the previous 5.1gpt. An inferred 715,000oz/6.5gpt area was said to represent a further “excellent resource-upgrade drill target” at Westralia.

A maiden reserve for Westralia and also Dacian’s Jupiter opencut-mine resource is expected to be calculated later this year.

The company’s 2015 scoping study highlighted potential for a US$120 million, 2.5Mtpa mining operation and plant producing at least 220,000ozpa (and up to 280,000ozpa) for seven years at all-in sustaining costs around US$700/oz. Dacian is aiming to complete about 90km of drilling this year to underpin its DFS, and hopes to get into production at Mount Morgans by early 2018.

The company and its executive chairman Williams, the former CEO of Avoca Resources before its merger with Canada’s Anatiolia Minerals to form Alacer Gold, and veteran geologist with WMC, have said the application of new geological theories and exploration methods at Mount Morgans was the key to unlocking vast latent resource potential.

“Dacian’s belief in Mount Morgans’ potential was also underpinned by the lack of exploration by the project’s previous owners over many decades,” the company says.

Eagle Research’s Keith Goode says Dacian’s application of “innovative geology, using techniques [we have] not seen before” has not only helped the company quickly add resource ounces at Westralia and Jupiter, but also to fundamentally change the strategic approach to exploration at one of Western Australia’s major historical mineral fields.

The identification of shallow-angled north plunging thrust (apparently) controlling high-grade mineralised shoots at Westralia – where previously steeply southerly plunging shoots were perceived – could become “a game changer” for the explorer in terms of opening up significant additional up and down plunge areas for exploration.

“[The north plunging thrust] has been identified using great circle stereonets in the Morgans underground,” Goode says in his latest report on Dacian.

“Its significance is that the higher grade ore shoots within Westralia could be plunging shallowly north instead of steeply south, and open up [numerous] areas previously perceived as low grade.

“Another innovation has been through applying BIF (banded iron formation) facies to more easily identify the higher grade areas of the BIF package.”

A further innovation was Dacian’s application of magnetic susceptibility testing to all Jupiter drill holes in work that seemed to suggest the area’s north-south striking syenite intrusive rock structures that host the gold mineralisation may link up about 500m below surface.

Other syenite discoveries made at Jupiter are yet to be added to overall project resources.

And Dacian has several more drill-ready targets at its large ground-holding in a region that has already yielded many multi-million-oz gold finds.