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Phoenix Copper Ltd - North American-focused base and precious metals explorer - Announces updated NI 43-101 compliant resource for its Empire open pit mine located in the US state of Idaho. The updated measured & indicated resource is 22.9 million tonnes, a 19% increase from 19.3 million tonnes in May. The updated measured & indicated figure includes: a 10% increase in gold to 238,406 ounces; 11% increase in silver to 7.59 million ounces; 7% increase in copper to 87,543 tonnes; and 17% increase in zinc to 43,871 tonnes.
The updated resource was established after a 32-hole drilling programme which has a direct cost of under USD300,000 and represents 7% of the total 445 drill holes in the current resource model. Phoenix said an updates preliminary economic assessment is now underway for the Empire open pit project based on the resource update as well as recent metallurgical test work.
Chief Executive Ryan McDermott says: "In this updated resource estimation, Hard Rock Consulting modelled the various mineralised trends separately so that substantial gold and silver grades could stand on their own and not be subjected solely to the surrounding copper values. This resulted in a larger overall pit shell that is inclusive of significantly more metal. The Phoenix team continues with the metallurgical evaluation of process designs for the polymetallic ore with the objective of maximising the recovery of copper, zinc, gold and silver, versus the alternative of processing oxide-copper ore and taking the other metals simply as by-products from the oxide copper processing.
"Including the Inferred resources, we now have 129,641 tonnes of copper, 58,440 tonnes of zinc, 10,133,772 ounces of silver and 355,523 ounces of gold."
Current stock price: 46.42 pence
Year-to-date change: up sharply from 13.00p
By Anna Farley; annafarley@alliancenews.com
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