Thoughts Paddy?12 Mar 2021 09:23
My central question is this……while it is clear from the Dec 2020 announcement that IMRE is for 4.2m Au oz equivalent, it is not clear (to me at least), just what proportion of the SE corner orebody is accounted for in this estimate. I point this out as in my own mind, I have been thinking that it was all of it. So ……again just my own thinking…..if this estimate was to increase in the future, it would need to come from further exploration drilling below 1000m and perhaps, further SE.
Now……if you follow my line of reasoning, see the sentence below, extracted from the IMRE announcement, and the key words…..represents a portion……which I had previously skipped over. Well……what portion ? Was it half ? Most of it ? What ?
Initial Resource Represents a Portion of Mineralised System Footprint: The Inferred Resource is centred on the South East Crescent and adjacent Breccia including a portion of the Northern Breccia. Consequently, the Initial Inferred Resource represents a portion of the currently identified mineralised system footprint (approximately 650m x 350m x 1000m).
Next…….read the following extract, which comes from today’s RNS.
Drilling activity during the period utilised up to eight drill rigs, and the results reported today include 26 new drill holes (completed since the last release dated 28 January 2021) from infill drilling of the South East Crescent and adjacent Breccia Zone. These 26 holes complete a 43 hole infill drill programme (to a nominal 50m by 50m drill spacing) designed to support the delivery of an Indicated Mineral Resource estimate in the upper 320m (vertical) of the initial Inferred Mineral Resource estimate defined over the South East Crescent Zone and adjacent Breccia Zone, and associated studies.
You can see from this that the initially labelled ‘portion’ is now defined as the top 320m of the SE orebody, below the Permian cover ?
Now to me, there are two possible interpretations of this data..
Firstly, maybe the Indicated resource is only going to represent a subset of the original Inferred resource. While I would have thought this unlikely, if it is so, then the GGP BoD need to get out ahead of this news as the Indicated resource will be smaller than the Inferred and might be seen as very negative news.
Conversely, if both the Inferred and Indicated resources cover only the same, top 320m, then the implications might be very positive indeed. My understanding is that we have already drilled to at least 1000m and continue to encounter high grade mineralisation. IF that is the case and IF this analysis is not horribly misconceived (it probably is), then it seems clear to me that with subsequent infill drilling down to 1000m, then there should at some point, be another Inferred estimate, fully three times the size of the IMRE.
So the SE corner by itself, through simple extrapolation, would have around 12.6m oz au eq……..and still be open to the s