Tuesday, November 14, 2017

SolGold Update

DISCLOSURE: I own shares in Sol Gold, and before you ask, I'm irritated that they did a financing at GBP0.25p.

Well we are moving into the home straight, we've been promised a maiden resource by the end of the year (link), so it was nice to get some more drill results to have a look at. You can download my 3D model here (link) and open it in Leapfrog Viewer.

Obviously, we are all waiting for the initial resource calculation that was promised by the end of the year. We've only got a couple of weeks before the Christmas party and tax sell-off season starts, so it will be interesting to see if SolGold can deliver.


Summary


  • Infill holes, duplicating and extending to depth known mineralization
  • Is hole CSD-17-028 hinting at a core of a system just to the south (currently being explored by hole 030)?
  • Hole CSD-17-026-D1
    • Similar grades to adjacent hole CSD-14-009
    • high-grade lower zone (from 1150m) looks to be quite consistent
    • upper zone looks to be quite narrow, and may link up with the high-grade zone in hole 14
  • Hole CSD-17-028 - drilled between holes 021 and 022, similar grades and thicknesses

Geology Drivel

Even though these results are groundbreaking, just extending and exploring known zones, they do appear to show that in there could be more than one grade center at Alpala. I also hate that they don't highlight where the holes are located.



I not going to say that there are 2 porphyry centers (I haven't seen the drill-core or any interpretative geological plans for the project), so I've done some doodling on the map that accompanied the PR.

WARNING: Geology doodles by an insane, de-bearded geologist
So I'm quite excited about holes 30 and 30-D1. If they come back with some decent intercepts my stupid idea  alternate interpretation could be correct, it could have a nice positive effect on an undated resource calculation in 2018, as these holes won't have been completed by the time the initial 43-101 resource is published in the next few weeks.

If we look at the holes individually, and again, I only have the data in the press release to work with, so it is incomplete and a best guess.


Hole CSD-17-026-D1



We can see that hole 026-D1 hit a decent zone of material grading >0.7% Au and >0.45 Cu. My feeling on why the Au zone appears thicker is a effect on how the data has been reported, and we would see a >1g/t zone from 1400m to 1550m but it wasn't split out in the PR.


Hole CSD-17-028



Hole CSD-17-028 was drilled between holes CSD-16-021 and 022, so I'm assuming that it was an infill hole to provide more confidence in these intercepts. It returned very similar results to hole 021.


Resources

I've hidden this at the bottom of the post. I'm not 100% (or even 50%) confident in my officially bad resource guesswork for Alpala, but I wanted to include the table to see what numbers I come up with to see how SolGold will get to their:



I regard this statement as a BS, the recent drilling didn't do much to their resources, and I don't know why they are mentioning that they want to define a billion tonnes at 0.9% CuEq at a 0.3% CuEq cutoff. That puts it firmly in the uneconomic category for an underground block-cave.




So according to Macquarie, for a 0.9% CuEq block cave to give an IRR of 15%, it will need to have Cu at >US$3.5/lb and Au >$1750/oz.

Personally, I'll be looking at the size and continuity of the >1% CuEq cutoff resources.



So, I'm not sure that they'll get to their billion tonnes, but I'm convinced that my model is under reporting the narrow-high-grade zones.







2 comments:

  1. Newcrest, at their largest mine in OZ, is block caving 10 mill T/yr of .6% Cu eq of which some 90% is recovered. Newcrest have the largest holding in Solgold, last I looked just under 20%. Newcrest are in the best position to know if this orebody is mineable. Newcrest have continued to maintain their stake in Solgold at each financing.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hello RJ,

      Newcrest are experts in large block cave operations. However, one big difference at Cadia is that it started as an open pit operation (http://www.portergeo.com.au/database/mineinfo.asp?mineid=mn228), which meant that a lot of the surface facilities were already built which has a significant impact on reducing CAPEX compared to a greenfields block cave operation.

      Newcrest have much more access to information on Alpala and I agree that Alpala represents one of the better porphyry-copper gold projects owned by a Junior company. However, I want to see some drilling on the other targets as I'm concerned that Alpala isn't quite as good as being marketed and the push for a billion tonnes will include a lot of material that is uneconomic for an underground operation.

      Delete