additional high-grade CBM veins continue to be discovered
Gerardo Del Real: Absolutely. Now you called this a new discovery in the press release; can you add to that a little bit, and just provide some context to why you consider this a new discovery?
Mario Stifano: Great question. The Alacran ore body and the Alacran pit that we have initial resource of 53-54 million tonnes of 0.7 copper, 0.37 gold, which is a great high grade open pit, and we know it's going to get a lot bigger. This particular hole is quite different and distinct from the main mineralizing event at Alacran.
This is a carbonate-base metal vein. If you look at carbonate-base metal mine, a good example of that would be Buritica at Continental Gold because it's just south of us; they're at 10 million ounces, 10 grams. Porgera, which is one of Barrick's larger mines, used to be the flagship mine for Placer Dome.
These type of CBM style gold mineralizing events are usually extremely high grade, very large ore bodies. We hit one, and as you can see we've hit tremendous grade with that intersect. We think these particular CBM veins are dipping to the east versus the main mineralizing event at Alacran is dipping to the west, that's why it's never been drilled.
If you take a step back and take a look at it from a non-geological perspective, there's been 70 artisanal miners here mining for 30 years. I can tell you, they're not mining 1 gram gold here. This is for the very first time we've been able to drill in the village area where these artisanal miners are, because we have such a great relationship with them. They want us to be successful here, so they've allowed us to drill right in the heart of where they're mining. Bam, we pull out one of the best holes ever.
Gerardo Del Real: Wonderful. It's my understanding that from here on out the plan will be obviously to continue to test the extensions of Alacran, but also to test for the newly discovered CBM veins, is that correct?
Mario Stifano: Yes, this is going to be a multi-faceted exploration program for us. Every mining company would die to have what we have at Alacran, but we're not just satisfied with Alacran. We're going to continue to explore to make Alacran a lot bigger, as well as look for other Alacrans and other targets.
From that, we got a couple of ideas of where the mineralizing source for Alacran may be. Alacran would have been formed off of fluids that formed a porphyry. What we're always on the hunt for is where is that porphyry. We got some great ideas now because we're started to understand Alacran a lot better, so we're going to be drilling looking for that porphyry source.
In addition to that, we're going to be drilling to try to extend Alacran to depth because we know it's open to depth. We know it's open updip to the east. Now in addition to that with these CBM veins, we know there's additional CBM veins because we've gone now and looked through at some of the older core, where we probably just touched the sides of these CBM veins. Effectively, we were drilling parallel to these veins, not cutting them, which you need to do in drilling. We're seeing some high grade gold intercepts and some other drill holes, as well as zinc, which is telling us there's more of these around.
We're also going to be drilling looking to understand the potential size and scale of these CBM veins. Typically, these things go quite deep; we only yet know what the lateral width is and what the depth potential is of these CBM veins. I can tell you, we're going to drill this deposit aggressively and we will find out. We're going to be able to grow that hopefully significantly from that initial discovery.
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