Vizsla

Vizsla Resources share prices have been rocketing up recently on the back of some very juicy drill results (link and link) from their Copala project in Sinaloa, but is there more to the story than just a few hot holes or have they managed to consolidate a world-class mining district?

TL:DR version - No

What really interests me is that Vizsla keep telling us this:

Never been systematically explored? We have these maps in Vizsla's own PRs and presentations:

We have 2 areas with historic resources and a long section of the Animas vein with >100 holes on it. Maybe the drilling was done by the mine operator? Fortunately, Vizsla give us a helping hand and tell us at the bottom of the Panuco project page (just before the photos).

So, I went over to Sedar and downloaded the report. A full 100 pages of geological fun, which gently summarized the historic, non-systemaic work done by Silverstone, who only managed to drill:

Thta's only 21,641m in 200 holes. I'm guessing that Vizsla forgot about these holes. My guess is that the core doesn't exist anymore, or that looking at the long section above a chunk of the Clemes/Muerto zone was mined, and if we have a look at them, we see:

That they are a bit shite! Silverstone only managed to drill >21km of drilling in 2 holes and defined a small, low grade resource. Why?

We have 2 options:

1. Silverstone were crap, and managed to drill all the shite areas again and again
2. The mineralization at Copala is hosted in very small high-grade ore-shoots

Let us not question the competence of Silverstone, and focus on the second point - small, inconsistent zone of mineralization. We can look for this in a number of ways:

Directly

• High-grade mineralization restricted to 1 or 2 holes surrounded by lots of nothing
• high-grade intervals not joining up - the vein's the same, but suddenly the silver and gold have gone on holiday to a narrow foot-wall or hanging-wall vein

Here is a long section from the Honduras vein at Copala

Look at the scale - holes AM-20-08 is only 50m from holes 09, 10, and 11. We go from good to nothing in 50m. 

We see the same at the Napoleon discovery

There are some good drill-holes here, and the drilling here is at its early stage, but we can see that the high-grade intercepts are jumping from structure. We can also see that the "F" and "G" veins don;t appear to be very continuous, as they aren't intersected by hole NP-20-07 just 20m away.

Indirectly

• "Missing" intervals - we see on a map or section "waiting assay results", but the results never arrive
• "Missing holes" - were have the results for holes 01, 02, 05, 09 - WFT happened to holes 03, 04 and 06 --> they hot feck all is what happened.

Missing holes can also be expanded into an entire drill program going AWOL - this means all the holes were crap, and the company doesn't want to hurt everyone's feelings.

So, going through the technical report (you can download it from here), there is a table of all the narrow, high-grade hits (table 13.1)

This is just the first few intervals, there are 3 more pages for you to look at, but they look very similar to what Vizsla are getting and this is what they got:

This is crap for an underground mine, 370Kt @ 370 g/t AgEq, you can't do much with that.I hope Vizsla do find some massive ore-bodies, but the data presented by Silverstone and what we're seeing in the initial 2020 drilling data is that the high-grade mineralization is found is discrete, small ore-shoots.

One final comment, we're told this on the website:

How much are the mines producing? How big is the mill? Surely Vizsla will have some historic production figures to support the $23M purchase price?

BTW - Vizsla - Fresnillo don't own the Zacatecas district. Pan American and Capstone have a good chunk and ~50% was just sold by Santacruz silver to Zacatecas Silver earlier this year. You may want to correct that.

Some Sugar on you Porphyry, Sir?

Ahhh, mi viejo amigo El Cobre.

The Poliquins have been releasing some juicy results from El Cobre over the last few weeks (link and link)

Again, all we see is that they are drilling and re-drilling the same zones, it is now starting to get silly.

To the surprise of no-one, they got similar results to the previous dozen or so holes drilled into the same area. We do see that holes 65 and 70 are exploring the eastern and western limits to mineralization, but there has been plenty of holes poked into those areas as well.

I like the way that they drilled a nice shallow hole to make sure that they reamed the high-grade core rather than drilling below it and potentially adding some tonnes of hypothetical resources.

If we go back to the Feb release, where they did go and drill some of the other targets, all we see is Azucar drilling the known mineralization from a different angle, and getting nothing that is really any good.

Generally, crap, narrow (for a porphyry) low grade mineralization. No-one in the porphyry world is going to get an erection over 0.2 g/t Au and 0.2% Cu (except for ValOro’s Tepal project where that would be high-grade).

Azucar, you’ve put ~40+ holes into El Cobre, a resource calculation is due, all you are doing now is dicking everyone around. All you are doing is demonstrating that you have a small moderate grade porphyry that isn’t going anywhere. The regional targets are generally crap, and that you re demonstrating you lack of imagination by drilling the same areas time and time and time again.

What a waste.

One thing I hate in exploration is waste. Either wasting time (just by sitting on projects and doing nothing with them) or wasting money. 

Azucar are wasting money, they could have easily reduced the amount of drilling at El Cobre by at least 50% (and probably by 75%) and have no meaningful reducing in the quality of information, and will all that extra cash, could have easily put a few holes into some of the other targets that showing in every presentation and press release.

If those targets are any good, why don't you stick a fecking hole in them!

Evrim - oh dear

I was surprised that we got a PR from Evrim, I was expecting that they would wait until the new year to publish results, like our chums at GGI (link)!.

But they did publish the initial results, and they were....

not very special

how can we put this....not quite what the market was expecting...

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.

Oh dear

However, I'll turn your attention to this PR (link). This is where Evrim recieved ~$7.2M from Newmont, and it also tells us that they have to spend 80% (~$5.8M) of that to advance Cuale.

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!

Excellon - Platosa Resources

I have to admit, I don't like Platosa, I think it is crap. A deposit where too much money has been spent, it hasn't ever consistently been profitable, but people keep getting fixated on the grades and ignore everything else.

Excellon have trying to get Platosa to work for the best part of a decade. They've had problems with the unions, local communities, and water.

However, for me, the deposit's biggest Achilles heel is its size. Earlier this year we got the latest and greatest resources (link).

What is the correct word to describe them....

But unfortunately, with less boobs. Here they are....

Here are the resources from December 2014 (link).



Do you see how the M&I resource grades have plummeted from 2014 to 2018. I'm sure this is because the deposit has been mined very carefully and 3 1/2 years of very successful, profitable high-grade mining of a complicated deposit has taken its toll, but......

Ohhh, the production grades have been nowhere near the resource grades. The started off great, and then went on holiday.

continued mediocrity

the 2018 numbers look ok for the base metals

a general decline

Stupid question time - why is there a 6577 tonne (11%) difference between the SRK and Excellon production tonnages for 2017 (57,165 vs 63,842 tonnes)?

But for me, these are the funniest statistics



Wow, 10m drill spacing to accurately define the resources. I remember teasing Pretium about tight drilling.

Here it is visually (just for the mine area)

I wonder if the difference between resource and mine grade is because drilling has removed so much material

and this:



Holy Feck, you've drilled >358km (same distance Flint, Michigan is from Toronto) of drilling to have defined a total of  ~1.2 million tonnes @ 682 g/t Ag, 6.2% Pb and 7.4%Zn?

• 498,000 tonnes of resources @ 548 g/t Ag, 5.6 % Pb and 5.9 % Zn
• 696,469 tonnes produced @ 779 g/t Ag, 6.7% Pb and 8.5% Zn

Or to put it another way. Excellon have mined and defined:

• 1,194,469 tonnes grading 1287 g/t AgEq, or 49,458,316Moz AgEq
• Drilled 358,070 meters
• So this works out to a success rate of 138.12 oz AgEq per meter

If we compare that with Silvercrest's Las Chispas project we see:

• Total drilling 83,230m
• Total resources: 86,701,200 oz AgEq
• Success rate = 1041.7oz AgEq per meter

I'm being crude as Las Chispas is all inferred resources, but this is the reason I think that Platosa is crap and why I have shares in Silvercrest. Platosa is too fecking hard.

Silver Viper - forked tongue stuck in your mouth?

Hello Silver Viper minerals, how did the drilling go at Clemente?

You mobilized rigs back in October 2017 (link), started the 2000m program a couple of weeks later (link), and since then absolutely nothing, nada, zilch.

ohhh, sorry, my mistake, you've dropped the property (link), were the results that bad? Pro-tip - you probably want to include that PR on the website.

I wonder if we'll see the same with the drilling at La Virginia? You've told us that you have mobilized the rigs (link) a couple of weeks ago, and so we should be having a "drilling has started" PR sometime next week...or are they already turning?.

BTW, if you do get something interesting, please don't repeat your mistake with Orex Minerals and forget to raise money when the share price was high....

Bitch raising money at $0.08

Defiance Anomalies

Well feck my arse, Defiance have found some geofizz anomalies at San Acacio (link). Would these be the same as the huge silver anomalies that were announced in March?

You know, the ones where you still, after >7 months, haven't managed to release any results. I ahve to say, your property must be amazing, that none,not a single one of the holes drilled as part of your 5000m program that commenced in November of last year, hit a single interval that contained a moderate amount of silver. How shite is San Acacio?

Will we ever see these results, or was this a quick PR to hide Roger's resignation that was kindly squeezed in at the bottom of the PR?

Unfortunately, I'm not an expert on the AERI geophysical method, Defiance states:

Geophysicists, joining an dole line somewhere near you.

the exploration Silver Bullet, a a perfect, all singing and all dancing geophysical technique. However, I'm a bit skeptical, probably due to my lack of knowledge in the method, and I haven;t been able to fund much online, nothing about its "proof-of-concept testing resulting in multiple new discoveries in North America". So if anyone has some info, I would love to have a look.


Let's have a look at this anomaly..

I like the fact that only a small part of the survey area covers the resource

This survey area is different to the other, a dodgy drawing.

I love the way that you can't really relate the geofizz plan maps or sections to anything else. We can see that the Copper zone anomaly is 200-300m wide.

Defiance tell us that the anomaly compares favorable with geophysical images from the Cozamin Mine operated by Crapstone, so why don;t we compare the anomaly to a long section from Cozamin.

that massive triangle to the left.

huge isn't it....

Ermitaño - a low key resource

We got a rather low-key PR from Evrim about the maiden resource at Ermitaño (link), which was surprising as there have been several PRs with some very good drill results recently (link).

Realistic metal prices....not!

This equates to approx. 3.5Mt @ 4.0 g/t Au and 68 g/t Ag or 4.93 g/t AuEq (358 g/t AgEq), which represents 95% of all new inferred resources found by First Majestic.

Lol

It looks very interesting, especially for an initial resource. However, there isn't  much information on the project, all we get is a simple plan map...

and a long section..

Low grade zones always are on a diet, whereas high-grade area (like small dogs) expand to fill as much space as possible...

These holes are very widely spaced (>100m), and have First Majestic inflated the tonnages by using a very big search radius (i.e. using all of the drill-hole data no matter how far apart they are)?

Here is a Leapfrog view of the data (link). I had to use trigonometry to estimate the hole lengths and dips, and so they will be a bit out.

My long section (looking north - east to the right). Showing DH intercepts and 50m, 100m and 200m radius buffers.

Drill-hole spacing to define a resource varies by the deposit style and metal distribution, so here are some examples for similar (Epithermal) deposits to see what they used for inferred resources:

La Guitarra - First Majestic


Los Gatos (Sunshine Precious Metals)


San Jose (Quintana Resources)


San Martin (First Majestic)


Santa Elena (First Majestic)


We can see that there are many different criteria, but in general we get:

• Indicated Resources ~50m sample/drill-hole spacing
• Inferred Resources >50m (but anything massively over 100m is unrealistic).

So First Majestic do seem to be pushing the limits for the resources limits at Ermitaño, nothing major, but a hole drilled between 06 and 10 would be a good idea to increase confidence, especially in the western area where the few, high-grade holes are >100m apart.

The fact that First majestic plan to drill 18,000m at Ermitano is very positive, it shows that they are confident in finding new zones and expanding on the known resources, but it would be nice to have a bit more information (e.g. where the heck is the Aitana vein located) showing targets and proposed exploration areas.

Almadex - annual return

I've received some comments on a post I wrote back in Jan 2017 on El Cobre (link). I haven't been following them but I was intrigued on why Newcrest were so interested (link). What has changed since my last post?

We've had some reasonable intercepts (link, link and link) over last year, so I thought, time to do an update as this project is ripe for an initial resource estimate. So here is my officially bad guesstimate:

Some gold, not much copper

So using a >0.4 g/t Au and >0.15% Cu cut-offs we get:

• ~92Mt @ 0.68 g/t Au and 0.25% Cu or 1.08 g/t AuEq (or 0.68% CuEq).
• or 2.03Moz Au and 160Kt Cu

Despite its name, El Cobre is in reality a gold deposit, but with ~2Moz @ ~0.7 g/t Au, is it good enough, especially when we have several, much larger deposits at a similar grade that are still sitting in the ground?

I want to look at the summary assay data in more detail, focusing on: 

1. Current mineralization
2. Expansion potential
3. Potential problems

I'm ignoring any socio-political issues and just looking at the summary assay data. As always, you can download the Leapfrog viewer file from here (link).

Current Mineralization and exploration potential

Here is a plan map showing the 4 areas that have been drilled by Almadex.

Plan Map

Here are a couple of pseudo-long sections (looking Northwest)

Gold

Copper

You can clearly see that the highest grade and thickest (i.e. the 'best') intercepts are from Norte, with a bit of copper at Villa Rica/Raya Tembrillo and some bits 'n' bobs in the other areas.

An interesting observation, when we compare the known targets against the soil geochemistry.

Au - left; Cu - right

We can see that the best area drilled at El Cobre, the Norte Zone has a minimal associated geochem anomalies, just a single line (Line 75800 - page 37 in the technical report), with some robust Au, Cu and Mo anomalies. I would love to see a regional map of soil Mo data as there could be a few other targets that could be interesting but where the Cu in the soils has been leached away.

Norte Zone

The Norte zone has received the bulk of the drilling and given the best results so far.

Au - far left = plan map with section lines, center = section A-A'; right = Section B-B'

Cu - far left = plan map with section lines, center = section A-A'; right = Section B-B'

We can see that Norte has been well drilled, the Au-Cu mineralization is well defined, with some >1 g/t Au zones in the core of the deposit and grading out into a lower grade (>0.25 g/t) halo. The mineralization is well drilled with most continuation to the mineralization closed off. However, the Au in hole EC-17-026 is still open to surface and to depth and would represent a good area to put a couple of holes as this could expand the 'resources' by up to 25%.

El Porvenir

Another regional target that has seen limited drilling. The standout hole has been DDH-04CB1 (drilled in 2004) that intersected 298m @ 0.38 g/t Au and 0.16% Cu.

Au - far left = plan map with section lines, Center = section A-A' - Au; right = Section A-A' - Cu

 The follow-up drilling isn't as special, intersecting several thick low-grade (<0.25% Cu) copper mineralization with a few narrow higher grade Cu-Au zones (dykes?). There may be some potential to the SW (left), but overall the grades are low and for gold discontinuous.

Villa Rica/Raya Tembrillo

We've only had a few holes drilled into Villa Rica, so it is hard to have a definitive opinion.

Au - far left = plan map with section lines, Center = section A-A' - Au; right = Section A-A' - Cu

Form the drilling so far, we can see that Villa Rica is more copper rich, with thick low grade intercepts (<0.25% Cu) with higher grade Cu and Au mineralization restricted to narrow zones - better mineralized dykes or breccias? It was also interesting to see high-grade copper at/close to surface - are we seeing some supergene enrichment?

I feel that the drilling to date shows that the potential at Villa Rica is limited. The geochem data shows a large target, but this may be an erosion anomaly (i.e. copper weathering down-slope towards the streams to the east and south).

Encinal

This is the area where Almadex hit a high-grade gold vein in hole EC-16-008.

Top left = plan map; top right - section A-A' - Au; bottom right = section A-A' - Cu

Again, we see generally thin, scattered intercepts, but hole EC-17-025 did intersect a thick zone of low grade (<0.25%) copper mineralization that could be peripheral to a larger system to the East (right).

Potential Problems

The most obvious problem could be the metallurgy. I haven't seen any mention in in the technical report about any basic met-work. It would be nice to know the distribution and style of mineralization (e.g. is the gold all in sulfides, or is there a thick oxide zone etc..) as this could have a big impact on the processing (dump leach vs milling) and recoveries. If you're interesting here is a link to a decent paper on the subject (link).

Summary

Overall, outside of the Norte zone, most of the economic Au-Cu mineralization appears to be restricted to narrow scattered intercepts. There may be potential to the east in Encinal, but nothing that is indicative of a large, well mineralized porphyry system.

For me, I can't see where the project could be expanded to >5Moz Au that could lead to development, and the regional targets don't appear to offer any upside.