Garibaldi - attack of the biscuits

Sorry for my tardiness, I was playing around with copper deposits.

We got a PR from our chums at Garibaldi Resources announcing the first of many few drill results from Nickel Mountain (link)

To the surprise of no-one, we didn’t get any decent maps with this PR, just a couple that re hard to read at the bottom of the PR - I couldn’t see where these new holes were located , could you?

but fear ye not, here they are....

OMG!!!!! both of them have targeted the Swiss Cheese Discovery Zone.

Let’s look at the holes in a bit more detail

Hole EL-19-47

This is drilling the eastern continuation of the lower discovery zone.

That hole was drilled a massive 15m from hole EL-18-16 and 24m from the massive sulfide hit in hole EL-18-24. Not really a massive leap of faith that would add millions and millions of tonnes to the deposit.

EL-19-53

This hole was drilled from the same platform as hole 47 but in a different direction, plunging into the heart of the known

Just 11.3m from the massive sulfides hit in hole EL-18-22

And 14.3m from the massive sulfides in hole EL-18-20…

Warning: the following image contains an “interpretation” involving one or more squiggly lines and maybe words, but definitely no numbers. Please sit down!

What is cool, is that you can join up the massive sulfide hits in several holes to work out an approximate outline of the Discovery Zone.

Isometric view looking SW. Red outline is my interpreted limit to sulfide mineralization

In Plan view, with some annotations and a scale

I added the 10m buffers around the drill-holes as it allows you to quickly see areas they haven't been drilled. 

A lot (20) of holes have penetrated the lower discovery zone defining a zone of massive sulfides that:

• Dimensions of ~125m long, 15-35m wide and 5-10m thick (true thickness)
• Or an approximate volume of 23,500 cubic meters
• Or an approximate tonnage of 108,000 tonnes (using an SG of 4.6*)

*SG of Pentlandite (main Ni sulfide) is 4.6 to 5.0; Chalcopyrite (copper sulfide) is 4.1 to 4.3

So, Nickel Mountains isn't big, but there are a few areas where mineralization can be expanded

dashed green outlines - where mineralization appears to be open

Summary

Nothing new, just a couple of holes pushing the boundaries of mineralization by a metaphorical duck’s fart, and just for fun, here is the Nickel Mountain deposit compared to that tiddler, Voisey’s Bay.

Leapfrog viewer file can be downloaded from here

Cu Acquisitions

I had a chuckle at Cordoba’s PR (link) on their resources, it is quite small, and spread over several deposits, but it made me think….

How good does a porphyry copper deposit need to be to give a massive erection to a mining executive and make them splash their wodge to buy it?

Fortunately, Oroco Resources had included a nice slide in their presentation (link), that I was able to use.

Assumptions:

• CuEq derived from Cu and Au, the other metals don’t generate much value
• 100% recovery
• Metal prices of:
• Cu = US$2.50/lb
• Au = US$1250/oz
• Ag = no-one gives a shit about this

Magenta = San Matias

Quite a spread, please note that I haven’t separated producing mines from development projects, and many of the largest deposits will have a high-grade core/starter pit (e.g. Cobre Panama), but you can clearly see that all bar one (El Pilar in Mexico) contained >1Mt copper.

So, plot on your favorite Cu project to see where it is, as companies don't appear to be very choosy with what they buy,.

In my opinion, we can see that lots of these projects are too low grade (<0.5% Cu) for development, but it seems that the only thing that matters is size.

I’m sure it is more technical than that, but it is an interesting guide to have a look to see is out there, and when copper starts raging, the FOMO will be strong and lots of stupid strategic acquisitions will be made and hopefully you’ll make out like bandits.