Royal Nickel Corp. RNKLF

Very good and revealing RNX Mining Spotlight transcript

[pierreg]

I transcribed in its entirety, the very good and revealing RNC Minerals (TSX:RNX) Mining Spotlight - Mark Selby, 2018 International Mining and Resources Conference, posted on YouTube February 5th 2019:

Mark Selby: « Very glad to have the chance to present here at International Mining and Resources Conference. The last six weeks has been a whirlwind for the company. Those of you who haven't seen the news, we just stumbled on one of the richest gold finds ever. We pulled out 25,000 ounces of gold from your living room and have basically identified a set of structures that we think have the potential to find more of that across ten kilometres of combined shear length. I'll go through the story now in some detail, so that's our team who were responsible for helping to find this gold. This is a brand new gold discovery and a brand new horizon in the middle of the Kalgoorlie Kambalda camp. We are the first company to be mining down in the Lunnon basalt and there was an important set of structures there that have yielded these specimens that are about 40%, 400,000 grams per tonne gold sitting in front there and King Henry here is in front of me.

We have the potential, we've always believed in the resource potential of this asset, we just never had the capital to develop it. We now have it, we basically have multiple shear zones each more than two kilometers in extent and with these structures that could go even seven kilometers long, you know the team's been unlocking this puzzle and the sediment structure and that exists literally not just across our property but across the entire region, is the key thing that creates this high-grade gold. We're right in the middle of the Kambalda camp, a few kilometers down the road from the BHP mill. When we picked up this mine in early 2016 what attracted to us was a land package that was on a very clear goal trend that had produced over 12 million ounces and we’re situated right in the middle of it. The other key pieces of this deposit, just the scale of what was there. You know, it wasn't four kilometres of interesting structure or four kilometers of a very interesting anomaly, no it was four kilometres of drill intersections with gold in them that those red dots scattered across the page are all gold intersections from over 700 kilometres of drilling from when this was operated as a nickel mine over 50 years. It basically highlighted the tops of four separate shear structures and as you can see there's four separate open pit mines that were producing sitting above us. If you've come by the booth some of you may have seen these two rocks, this one from our recent Father's Day vein discovery is that large circle at the top, this one is from our Hand of Faith area which is down at the bottom of the page, these are found three kilometers apart so you know there's been a lot of talk about oh this is just a one-off, they'll never find anything else that looks like this. We understand why this was here we understand you know where these structures exist and again the same system that generated this piece of rock is generating this rock which is this very similar gold content, three kilometers away on a separate shear at a different level in the mine. So again, we think this has massive, massive potential both for high-grade gold and in terms of total ounces. We are sitting, the reason we have access to the Lunnon basalt is just a function of geography. We are at the top of the Kambalda dome and a ramp plunges along the top of the basalt. So we have access to this structure where many other people in the camp don't have it, so you know we have the potential for those shears, each four kilometers long to run at least a kilometer or more deep, we see that in Canada all the time and we don't see any reason why it won't be repeated here at Beta Hunt. This shows you in plan where those four shears are sitting and again you know where the distance between where the Father's Day vein discovery is and where the hand of faith was found before. Again, all these intersections that are showed is from historic nickel drilling so they give us the signpost for where all of these particular shears are sitting.

Like most things in mining it's a little bit of science and a lot of luck. This discovery in September, the seeds of it began more than a year ago in September 2017. We were down on the first new level in this mine deeper in it deeper into the Basalt than anybody had been before and as we're driving along expecting two and a half to three grams material which is what our A Zone is like you know, we find 750 ounces of rock that looks like this, except it wasn't sitting up at the nickel contact where historically the Beta Hunt mine, you know had found these type of specimen gold sitting underneath the nickel lenses. So we started to look at why it's there, notice that there was pyritic sediment associated with the gold and then started to do the work and understood about this pyritic sediment layer that cuts across the entire property. In June or July, we laid out a stope in along from where we found this 700 ounces and again, as we're mining expecting two and a half to three gram per ton material to come out, again 15 hundred ounces of specimen gold that looks just like this, literally comes out on to the ROM and adds a lot of cash very quickly. So again, we've hit this twice already. By this point we've already developed another 25 meters lower down to what we call our 15 level and obviously the sediments are kind of important so we head for the first place that we have, some indication of where they exist. We didn't quite get a thousand ounces but we pulled out another 180 ounces again confirming that the model worked so off and on through August we were driving along the shear, trying to see whether we could find more this high-grade gold. On the last Thursday of August our mine manager came back Kevin Small who's been running this operation for us, realized we're actually on the hanging wall and based on our model we should actually be on the foot wall and so literally did a right turn. Saturday afternoon I got a picture of a nugget sitting on his desk and he said oh this was a 16 ounce nugget sitting in the face and two days later I get an email in the middle of the night that says we found two large nuggets and have  pulled out thousands of ounces of gold from the structure and we continue to pull out ounces and some very beautiful specimen stones that we are prepping and ready to bring to market which we think will trade at a very, very large premium to the gold content. This is the model we put this in our data room. We had this asset for sale fortunately the sale did not go through, but basically why it's here is this, the sediment structure has iron sulphides, the fluids coming up through the shear hit these iron sulfides, the gold drops out and that gold ends up in these extensional veins coming out away from the shear zone. This gives us tens of meters of potential interaction between that sediment layer and the shear zone. So what was nice was this was the model at the end of end of June and then we when we went into that face in September you see you know very, very strong visual confirmation that that model works. So you know we're in this shear, you've got a sediment sitting in the middle of it and coming off the end are these extensional veins loaded with gold. So that's where these nice chunks of rock come from. That was a piece of solid gold that had to be taken out of the face with metal snips because you can't break pure gold, so it had to be cut out of the face to get going and on the right there again you can see these extensional veins just loaded up with gold. We've mapped out the sediment sitting in the shear for over 500 meters. We've got one drill now going and we're going to be working along that shear structure to try and find more high-grade material. We went back came close to where that stope was and maps there and again this extensional vein loaded up with the gold was sitting right where we're supposed to be, so again another confirmation that the model works and that the sediment generates high-grade gold.

The potential for the mine is massive as I said each of these shears runs for several kilometres. We think they can go for kilometer to kilometre and a half deep at least. That little purple box there is the intersection area of where these sediments are sitting in the shear that can be projected back along each of those shears for several kilometres and so you know we think it opens up three to four million tonnes at grade wise that's a TBD but the average grade of what we pulled out so far is about a hundred and fifty ounces per ton or 4,500 grams per tonne so even if we get 1% of that, you're looking at three or four million ounces just you know in that small area and the other part of that our team is very excited about, is to drill beneath that sediment structure to see what the average grade is fundamentally. To get this much gold into one little Rock you either have to have fluids with a lot of gold, a lot of fluids or both and so, we've got this on multiple shears and so we can't wait to start drilling lower down in those shear structures to see what the base grade is going to look like. So stay tuned, the drilling is coming and hopefully we'll be back next year with even more exciting samples. Thank you. »
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=thI2ltouE20