Diamond & Specialty Minerals Summary for Nov. 30, 2022
2022-11-30 17:56 ET - Market Summary
by Will Purcell
The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score on Wednesday was a pleasing 113-79-118 as the TSX Venture Exchange added 12 points to 591. Grenville Thomas and Ken Armstrong's North Arrow Minerals Inc. (NAR) closed unchanged at five cents on 42,000 shares.
North Arrow is wrapping up its busiest exploration effort in years at Pikoo, 140 kilometres east of La Ronge in Saskatchewan, and is cashing up its treasury ahead of a proposed 2023 drill program on the nearly 40,000-hectare property. Pikoo caught the market's eye nine years ago, but it fell silent after a few years of drilling failed to add to early enthusiasm following a small but rich discovery in 2013.
Mr. Armstrong, president and chief executive officer, says North Arrow collected 110 till samples from 10 areas and completed two ground geophysical surveys and some line cutting in advance of drilling next year. The till samples, he cheers, are intended to better define several unsourced kimberlite indicator mineral trains, and also to test previously unsampled areas down-ice of possible kimberlite targets identified from a review of earlier data. Processing of the samples, the company says, is under way in Thunder Bay.
North Arrow had good success early on, converting most of its early geophysical and indicator mineral anomalies into kimberlites, but Mr. Armstrong is particularly enthused that his current batch of targets being tested will deliver the goods. Over half of the till samples, he enthuses, were collected at targets generated using deep machine learning, technology that apparently has paid off at Ekati, where the approach was used by Arctic Canada Diamond Co. to discover two new kimberlites on ground well picked over during the past 30 years. "
The Ekati discoveries confirm that deep machine learning can be successfully applied in an extensively explored brownfields environment," Mr. Armstrong says, adding that North Arrow's record at Pikoo shows that till sampling on its own is an effective tool in that area. Accordingly, he concludes, "the Ekati discoveries confirm that deep machine learning can be successfully applied in an extensively explored brownfields environment."
While Pikoo might qualify as an extensively explored environment, thanks to the number of kimberlites the company found through the mid-2010s, only one of them was of lasting interest. That was PK-150, a find that rocked the market nine years ago when 210 kilograms of drill core produced 745 microdiamonds, including 23 that sat on a 0.85-millimetre sieve. Those gems, large enough to be considered commercial gems, weighed a collective 0.28 carat, good for a grade of 133 carats per hundred tonnes.
The news from Pikoo tripled North Arrow's stock that year and it got as high as $1.34 in early 2015, aided by new finds at Pikoo. The company also returned to PK-150 in that program and collected another 323 kilograms of kimberlite. The results were less impressive, as the rock held just 487 microdiamonds, but nine of the gems were of commercial weight and their cumulative weight, 0.185 carat, implied a grade of 57 carats per hundred tonnes.
That result on its own made PK-150 arguably the richest prairie kimberlite, topping the 55 carats per hundred tonnes achieved at K-252 in the Buffalo Hills of Northern Alberta. Combined with the earlier result, PK-150 graded about 87 carats per hundred tonnes. That would have been great news, of course, except that the kimberlite was far too small to be of interest on its own.
And so, the hunt goes on at Pikoo, as North Arrow chases more substantial kimberlites -- or at least several more similarly-sized bodies with PK-150-sized diamond grades. The company is also getting a jump on raising cash for a 2023 drill program, as it is offering 8.33 million flow-through shares at six cents and 20 million regular shares at five cents. Mr. Armstrong says the cash is for work on the company's diamond projects, and Pikoo looks to be the primary beneficiary next year.