RE:RE:RE:Good Stuff Volcanicevent, good stuff on enhancing the project economics at Eskay, also if Albino Lake comes through it will be as though delivering shareholders a complimentary gold perk on the Eskay platter.
Albion Lake is approximately 8 hectares in area with a volume of around 1,000,000 m3, Paul Geddes describes the waste rock dumped in Albion Lake primarily taken from driving their development along the rhyolite footwall off the contact mudstone, with the rhyolite having a conservative grade of around 2g/t-3g/t, what's unknown is the amount of bonanza gold & silver grade waste rock from the contact mudstone that was also dumped into the lake, dumped again according to Paul Geddes because of lack of cleaner ore needed to blend down the extremely high amounts of deleterious elements.
We know the lower grade rhyolite contains little if any amounts of deleterious elements, and that Albion Lake, because of the acid generated by subaerial exposed waste rock, primarily antimony (Sb), needed to be drawn-down in 2008, so as the waste rock could be regraded below the natural lake level. The fact that Albion Lake contained these high levels of Antimony signifies that a significant amount of the waste rock that was dumped did indeed come from the contact mudstone (being deleterious in nature), of which contains the bonanza gold & silver grades.
The next question that arises is what tonnage, and what grade might the waste rock hold? We know the cubic lake volume, and the majority of the waste rock (according to Geddes) is in rhyolite, a rock with a density of around 2.5, with the remainder waste rock from the contact mudstone. A back of the envelope calculation conservatively composed of 90% rhyolite, and 10% mudstone, a combine rock density of 2, and a combined grade of 5.5g/t, gives us around 2 million extra tonnes, and 350k additional ounces added to the resource, again just an estimate, but would have to believe the upside to be much larger than the downside. Also as a side note, the high amount of antimony presented in the mudstone waste rock may help elevate the % level needed so as to be included as a payable metal in the con.