But they did publish the initial results, and they were....
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| not very special |
how can we put this....not quite what the market was expecting...
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| ouch! |
We could amuse ourselves with the fact that the results weren't anything special (I'll be updating a LF model over the weekend). We have a narrow zone of moderate gold mineralization at surface with a interesting (from a scientific point of view) copper zone at depth.
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| Oh dear |
Will we see a massive amount of drilling at Cuale or a series of conversations to free up these funds to be spent elsewhere?
Welcome to exploration folks!
We should check what percentage of high sulphidation gold deposits have the main ore body located directly below high grade outcrop. I suspect you want the entire sequence preserved thus no outcrop. Making exploration more difficult is that cap rocks tend to be barren (but alteration should provide clues). At the Miwah project in a Sumatra Protected Forest (a location East Asia management conveniently failed to mention), they had high grade outcrop in a thin sliver of vuggy rock exposed in a hillside (possibly fed by vertical fractures coming off a distal fluid source at depth). Following that rock package into the hillside resulted in the discovery of a multi-million ounce deposit in a classic HS style (thick, flat-lying, laterally extensive). In retrospect the Evrim guys may have inadvertently set up their drilling for a high likelihood of initial failure at Cuale.
ReplyDeleteHighly likely, you can do the same with Lepanto, but the high-grade area is the best place to start, and as I said in a earlier post, gold is nuggety, and the very high-grade trench was the result of a skew from a few samples.
DeleteI with them luck, but there are no slam dunks in geology
They have another prospect called La Gloria nearby. It looks like it merits some basic work that may suggest drilling in the future.
DeleteAt least they have the funds to move this project forward!
DeleteRomero springs to mind as another deposit that was preserved by being blind.
DeleteSo I can understand why Evrim has collapsed, but why has Chakana followed it? I'd give my left nut to have some of those results. What's going on? Are the locals infuriated? Is it fill of arsenic? Is not actually their property?
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure, but maybe one reason is that the problem with breccia deposits is that they are small by volume, and you can bias the results by drilling down the guts of one.
DeleteYou get a great hit but you'll never, in general, get the tonnes to make an economic deposit.
Ahh...like Brixen's "Thorn".
DeleteIn the multistage HS deposits there are sometimes large tonnages hosted in different types of breccia pipes (Pascua, Veladero, Alturas Norte, etc). Chakana probably had too much hype at the start given it's a recycled project. You often see these plays drop quite a bit as the initial bloom wears off. That and copper plays in general have taken a beating this year. Chakana needs quite a bit more drilling to outline economic tonnages -- it's possible if they find good grades at some of the pipes that weren't extensively explored historically.
Deletethe breccias are also significantly larger than what is being found at Chakana.
DeleteI agree that some of the breccias will have good grades, and drilling can be 'designed' to maximize the intercepts, but the issue, where the mineralization appears to be only in narrow breccia pipes is adding sufficient volume.
The flip-side is, if they find a very high-grade breccia, it could be economic on a small scale.
Regards Evrim, I am not a geologist so would appreciate some help in understanding the EVM results.
ReplyDeleteThey had 351 meters of channel results showing 1.28 g/t gold and perpendicular to this channel, they had 135 meters of channel results @ 10.92 g/t gold.
Yet their drill results came up with nothing.
Exactly what were the geologists tracking when they were digging the channels 351 meters one way and 135 meters perpendicular to the first channel – they must have been following some kind of geological gold showings.
It is my understanding that channel samples are an expression of veins that come to the surface such that follow up drilling almost always comes up with some mineralization.
Yet nothing with EVM - what am I missing?
Hello Anon, I did a previous post on this
Deletehttps://angrygeologist.blogspot.com/2018/04/evrim-cuale-quick-comment.html
basically, the average grade of the channel sample was skewed upwards by two ultra-high-grade gold samples 2m @ 419 g/t Au and 0.8m at 359 g/t Au. Evrim did a typical junior exploration company BS-move and did some math to make sure that they smeared these high-grade samples over as wide a distance as possible.
Take these away and the average grade drops to just 2 g/t (so essentially 80% of the gold is in 2 samples).
The trenches fortuitously sampled a gold rich structure (I would assume that it had been excavated along a structure to maximize the results), and when the drilling started, it showed that all they had was a very small high-grade zone surrounded by nothing.
This is typical in gold occurrences, gold is distributed unevenly (the nugget effect).
Thanks for that, much appreciated.
ReplyDelete