Here is an example from Royal Nickel’s Beta Hunt “Hand of Faith" (link)
where they have released the following results:
Wow, 3.4m at 3.5 ounces/tonne, it looks like it is a very wide, very high grade vein, but if we look closer, we can see that they intersected:
- 3.4m grading 107.5 g/t Au,
- Including a narrower zone of 0.8m that returned 455.9 g/t Au
So what the rest of the 2.6m wide zone grade? We can calculate that quite easily. Personally, I prefer to use the Drill Interval calculator (link)
- width of high grade interval / width of structure
- 0.8 / 3.4 = 0.235 or the grade multiplication factor
- average grade of structure - (grade of high grade zone x grade multiplication factor)
- 107.5 - (455.9 x 0.235) = 0.22 g/t
So we can see that virtually all (99.8%!) of the gold is found within the 80cm wide structure. They have even included a nice photo of the structure.
Here we have a photo of the Hand of Faith zone that was drilled and returned bonanza gold grades. You can clearly see that only a small portion of the structure is mineralized, and the rest of the rock is essentially barren, but that hasn't stopped the company from presenting and advertising the Hand of Faith zone as being a 3.4m wide bonanza vein, whereas in reality it is a very narrow zone, with gold (in areas a lot of gold) found only in a very small part of it.
Unfortunately, this type of reporting is typical among exploration companies, I wish it would stop.
Great blog initiative, thanks. While this reporting issue is not unheard of, would you mind explaining why exactly this is misleading, in this case and broadly speaking? Would have thought that as long as the vein is reasonably shaped over the extent of the deposit with no excessive mining dilution (which you won't know with just one hole!), that's ok. Or is it because the barren stuff can't be processed with the ore?
ReplyDeleteI agree with Picsou in that I don't understand why is it so wrong. I understand that a 0.8m wide vein is not mineable, so I think it is fair for them to expand it to something logical. I have heard 1m on either side or minimum 3m in total width is what a cut and fill mining method can do.
ReplyDeleteIf they were to spread it over 10m, then for sure it is misleading because you more into a different mining method (bulk mining).
Is the issue that the true effective grade (i.e. grade net of recovery) for the low grade material is actually zero, so Royal Nickel should have weighted the 0.8m of 455.9 g/t with 1m on either side of material effectively grading 0 g/t to arrive at 455.9/(0.8 + 1 + 1)*0.8 = 130 g/t. 130 g/t seems pretty good worth 130/31.1 x 1200 = $5016 per tonne gross metal value.
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