RE: RE: NEWS - XRC DRILLING AT CASPICHE EXTENDS MAis
33 another hole 14. i.e. it just missed the main mineralized trend?That they are doing another test of this vector is significant. Theremay be some oxide resource in hole 33. It is marginal but maybe.....
Quite possibly -- the bottom of hole 33 has the higher mineralization which is trending toward the juicy part of hole 32. Hole 33 may have intercepted similar finger and pocket zones near surface as hole 14 -- porphyry deposits are notorious for this.
Despite the halo-type grade of hole 33, an encouraging sign not given a lot of detail in the press release is that the oxide zone on top was fairly robust. If you look at the various cross sections you will see that in many cases the better oxides lie directly on top of the higher grade sulfides. This essentially means that the section on which hole 33 was drilled might actually improve in grade both to the east and west.
One other interesting possibility that the press release did not expand upon (appropriately, since it is quite speculative) is that the main body of the deposit could actually be centered east of the anomaly -- with a possible satellite further west as well. So far Exeter has drilled only within the actual anomaly itself (see
https://www.exeterresource.com/images/projects/chile/caspiche/caspiche_property.jpg) but if the mineralization turns out to be proximal, not endemic, to the anomaly, the blue sky potential is quite significant simply because the footprint of the mineralized zone might be much larger than the size of the anomaly itself would otherwise suggest. Significantly, a similar anomaly to the northwest that was tested by hole 18 turned up a donut, which could support the "proximal thesis". In essence, the geological model (see
https://www.exeterresource.com/images/projects/chile/caspiche/caspiche_central_deposit.jpg) may need to be modified or refined.
A significant result of the full hole 32 assay is that the high grade zone appears remarkably similar in size to that encountered in both hole 16 (200 meters away) and hole 15 (400 meters away). Namely, a drill intercept of roughly 600-800 meters representing about 400 meters wide and at least 500 meters vertical grading plus 0.75g/t gold and 0.30% copper. That is at least 200 million tonnes containing over 5 million ounces of gold and 1 billion pounds of copper (I'm using a reasonable pit depth of about 700 meters and counting only the high grade core as potential ore). I view this as a conservative minimum at this point.
As for marginal grade on the oxide of hole 33, I beg to differ -- this is near surface oxide gold grading 0.47g/t that would normally represent waste rock overburden. The total size of the oxide blanket alone is now approaching 1 million ounces (not included in the figures in the paragraph above) and it could potentially grow large enough to be considered a standalone resource if metallurgy turns out to be good enough (in which case it may be possible to lower the oxide cutoff as low as 0.2g/t).
Last but not least, we can now fully appreciate the management wisdom of having raised money at the current share price -- at least 3 more holes will now be drilled, and if any of them returns grades like hole 32, the plot will really thicken.
Bottom line is that hole 32 represents over 1000 gram-meters of gold (intercept times grade) which is a very strong indication all by itself that Caspiche will turn out to be a world-class gold-copper deposit when all is said and done.