Patrick Power's Arctic Star Exploration Corp. (ADD), up one-half cent to 3.5 cents on 51,000 shares, is increasingly enthused about its Diagras project, just northeast of Diavik and east of Ekati in the Lac de Gras region of the Northwest Territories. While the company is eager to drill several ready-to-go targets, investors will have to be patient: Arctic Star must first raise the cash for a program presenting a two-to-three-month window of opportunity each spring. Nevertheless, Mr. Power, president and chief executive officer, and Buddy Doyle, his vice-president of exploration, believe the outcome will be worth the wait. Mr. Power expresses a feeling of bitterness that Arctic Star has lost a year at Diagras, thanks to the COVID-19 crisis and the continuing downturn in the diamond sector, but he acknowledges that without the diamond depression, Diagras would have been beyond his company's reach. De Beers Canada turned up nearly two dozen kimberlites, many of them diamondiferous, on what it called the Hardy Lake property, but none of them warranted larger tests and De Beers eventually dropped the project.
While De Beers had been persistent, its tenacity had involved the same approach over its decade-long effort. The company would identify a magnetic low, test the target, determine it was a dud kimberlite and then move on to the next magnetic low. The same approach at nearby Diavik led to a similar string of kimberlite disappointments in the early 1990s; it was not until Rio Tinto switched to testing electromagnetic targets that the rich Diavik pipes turned up.
Mr. Power says that he and Mr. Doyle are "data freaks" and with the COVID-19 lockdown they have had nothing better to do than pore over the old information covering the Diagras property. The data they have been examining includes gravity surveying, with the idea that less-dense kimberlites will stand out from the surrounding country rock. Those data leave Arctic Star with some promising targets ready for drilling.
Three of the targets are near the mildly diamondiferous Black Spruce kimberlite that disappointed not only De Beers, but also Majescor Resources Inc., which came along in the mid-2000s to give it a try. Unfortunately, Majescor's approach was to drill the same pipe based on the old methods, and no surprise, it got the same disappointment. Mr. Doyle, who has been chasing diamonds at Lac de Gras since the early 1990s, and Mr. Power, who has been promoting diamond hunts just as long, are convinced that the three targets, just south and east of Black Spruce, are where the diamonds are.
The new look at the data has identified at least eight other gravity targets separate from any of the magnetic anomalies that disappointed De Beers years ago. Mr. Power and Mr. Doyle say they would be "beyond surprised" if the targets are not kimberlites, and if they are, "there is a serious chance" that the diamond counts and qualities will be much better than what De Beers found.
Arctic Star also has geography on its side. Diagras is immediately northeast of the southwest-to-northeast line of rich kimberlites that run for 15 kilometres from A21 to Jay, within 10 kilometres of the Diagras boundary. A few dozen other kimberlites dot that trend on both the Ekati and Diavik properties. All the major magnetic targets were duds, while all the rich pipes were weakly-or-non-magnetic targets. As a result, Mr. Power and Mr. Doyle will be impatiently biding their time until they can get a drill turning on Diagras.
Claude Dufresne's Niobay Metals Inc. (NBY), up one-half cent to 24 cents on 10,000 shares, has received assays of up to 0.57 per cent niobium oxide over 246 metres from the last four holes of a seven-hole drill program at its James Bay niobium project in Northern Ontario. The three other holes in the latest batch delivered comparable grades over significant intervals, including a 0.6-per-cent hit over 128 metres, a result bolstered by a 37-metre subinterval that averaged 0.79 per cent.
Mr. Dufresne, president and CEO, deemed the latest results to be "in line with" the first three holes, although investors may recall that those assays ranged as high as 0.69 per cent niobium oxide over 185 metres, including a 61.8-metre zone that assayed 1.02 per cent. The results are comparable with Niobay's current resource estimate of 26 million tonnes indicated at 0.53 per cent niobium oxide and 25 million tonnes inferred at 0.51 per cent. Those tallies could grow, as the latest drilling tested the area north of the resource. An update should follow, as Niobay is working on a dream sheet, expected late this year.