TerraX reports third year of positive findings
Mine still a long way off, says CEO
Jessica Davey-Quantick
Northern News Services
Tuesday, December 6, 2016
SOMBA K'E/YELLOWKNIFE
It was another bang up year for Yellowknife City Gold project, but TerraX Minerals Inc. said it's still at least eight years away from the possibility of beginning production at a new mine.
Surface sampling results released on Thursday showed for the third year in a row, there is "substantial potential" for the area, according to CEO Joe Campbell.
The results, from the Dave's Pond mineralized structure, part of the Sam Otto target area, showed samples of up to 66.7 grams of gold per tonne.
"For the industry in general, if you're in that half gram to one gram range, people would then start to look at what the economies would be of trying to extract that. It's still relatively low grade, but there's many mines that are in that range that produce," said Campbell.
In contrast, Con Mine averaged about 16.1 grams of gold per tonne.
"So it's showing good potential that there's a deposit sitting somewhere in there, and we just have to do more exploration to find it," said Campbell.
The Yellowknife City Gold project covers 129 square kilometres of land located 15 kilometres outside Yellowknife, focused on the Yellowknife gold belt, which previously fed the Giant and Con mines. As Yellowknifer reported in 2014, TerraX started exploring the property, returning samples of up to 547 grams per tonne. In August 2015, TerraX discovered a new vein 50 kilometres away, yielding samples that at the time ranged from 21.4 to 129.5 grams per tonne.
Campbell said over the course of 2016, TerraX has carried out a "significant amount" of drilling, around 10,000 metres through the summer, with an additional 7,000 metres in the winter, with plans for more to continue in the new year.
"We want to go back into that area and do more exploration. So the intention right now for TerraX is to start up our drill program again in January," said Campbell.
The high sample sizes, he says, is a good indication that the juice might be worth the squeeze.
"You need lots of tonnes to make it worthwhile to actually start in the first place. And we think the Sam Otto area is an area where we'll be able to find the quantity," he said.
He's not willing to speculate on how much gold might be down there, however.
"We don't know yet, but obviously our expectations, our hopes and dreams let's say, are high," he said. "We have multiple zones of mineralization in this one area, so it's looking like a very promising area for us."
But he's quick to point out the gold rush isn't returning to Yellowknife just yet, estimating that even if this exploration led to the opening of a mine, that mine would be eight to 10 years in the future.
"We're still quite far away. What we've shown in there is that there's various stages of development of a project, and we're still at the early stages. We're still exploring," he said.
The exploration process, he says, takes time.
"The area that we've done most of our drilling in, you see a very subtle overprint on the rock, that indicates that it's had some fluid go through it, and this is natural fluid from many, many years ago. The types of alterations that we see are often associated with gold. And so what we do when we see that is we sample it, in the core, and that's when you wait for your results," said Campbell.
The next round of sampling will have to wait until temperatures drop.
"We have to wait for the ice conditions to build, and this fall has been a fairly slow one. So we need to have a certain ice thickness before we can bring equipment onto the ice," he said, adding he hopes the ice will be thick enough by the middle of January to put roads in place and transport equipment.
This year's project was funded with over $10 million, which Campbell says was raised mostly from European investors. According to Natural Resources Canada, spending on mineral exploration and deposit appraisal dropped this year in all three Canadian territories - falling 47 per cent in the NWT, down to $53 million compared to $100.9 million in 2015.
Campbell said despite a shaky year for minerals, he's hopeful for the future.
"Gold hasn't been doing very well at all," he said. "We've been able to do it because this is an exceptional project. It's a very good probability that we're going to be able to find something to move it forward."
