El Cobre - pure green!!

El Cobre, I was put onto this project by some chums in the UK, as they are getting massive erections over this project, hoping that the Poliquin's can work their magic again and make everyone rich.

The El Cobre project was spun out of Almaden Minerals as it was a bit overshadowed by Ixtaca. They've released some drill-results recently (here and here), which are either:

• Crap and deep or
• Deep and crap
• There is evidence of massive grade smearing from short, high-grade inconsistent type veins
• All the obvious targets have been drilled and hit nothing decent.

I'm also confused why Almadex are advertising this project as a 'new' discovery in their current presentation? El Cobre has been explored on and off since 1995 and 'new' project don't often have 35 holes (~7,000 m) drilled into several targets around the property.

Historic holes = yellow points; 2016 drilling = red points

We know that in the past there were different metal prices which can turn one exploration company's junk into another's treasure...

nothing special here.

Wow, those are the best of the bunch? So basically 23 out of 35 holes hit anything that graded >0.1 g/t Au or >0/1% Cu. So 12 (about a third) hit nothing at all.

Overall, those intercepts are rubbish - 0.1% copper and ~0.2 g/t Au aren't very special! That's a green skid-mark, not a gold-rich copper porphyry deposit.

Did Kermit wipe his ass (and his gold-plated cock ring) on the drill-core?

This is what Blackadder thinks....

We'll ignore the old data and focus on the recent results.

They look pretty decent, abut when we sweep away the PR BS and look at the data in 3D we can quickly see that the thick moderate grade intervals dissolve away into a series of high-grade (relatively speaking), narrow zones surrounded by low grade crap.

PR data

Some decent, thick intercepts

 Split apart assays

a bit different.....

The last hole reported, EC-16-013 is returning consistently lower grade than holes 010 and 012 and it really shows that this 'new' zone isn't very big and doesn't really have any potential to grow.

WTF! Where did all the grade go? However, I'm saving the best for last, drill-hole EC-16-008

ohh, you can't see the high grade zone? Let me zoom in a bit for you....

yup, 1.5m @ 109.5 g/t Au

When you split out the narrow higher grade zones the background grades fall through the floor, and it become obvious that all you have is a few high grade structures surrounded by low grade rubbish.

You can find a series of 3D views here (link), I've also included the geochemistry and geophysics for fun.