Excerpt from Stockwatch Gold-TodayOn Rupert resources
James Withall's Rupert Resources Ltd. (RUP) had a good day, adding five cents to $4.75 on 74,000 shares on word it has drilled a 141-metre interval averaging 3.6 grams of gold per tonne at its Rupert Lapland project in northern Finland. That hit, and most of the other encouraging new encounters, came from the Ikkari deposit, but the infill holes were no great surprise as Ikkari is already a multimillion-ounce deposit.
Not all the tests were looking to upgrade existing resources, as some were drilled beyond the bounds of the current model, including one that yielded 74.1 grams of gold per tonne over six metres, drilled to the west of the deposit, and another with 1.5 grams per tonne over 14 metres at depth.
Rupert also received assays from several holes drilled into the Koppelo target, the best of which mustered 5.3 grams of near-surface gold per tonne over 3.1 metres. A second of the 17 Koppelo holes produced 3.3 grams per tonne over three metres, but most of the others had lower grades and narrower intervals. Mr. Withall, CEO, says the drilling is at the halfway point and initial results "confirm the exceptional continuity" of the Ikkari resource and its "potential for resource expansions in the west and at depth." He also mentioned the new area, seven kilometres to the east at Koppelo, but he sloughed it off as "further mineralization."
Ikkari is the key play -- a "high-confidence, derisked resource" in Mr. Withall's words -- as laid out in a preliminary economic assessment late last year. The plan includes 48.3 million tonnes indicated at 2.5 grams of gold per tonne and 20.4 million tonnes inferred at 1.9 grams per tonne, good for 5.1 million ounces of gold. Most of the ounces -- about 4.5 million of them -- are at Ikkari, with most of the rest at Pahtavaara. Further, most of the ounces at Ikkari are amenable to open-pit mining.
And so, the dream sheet proposed a 22-year mine that would cost $405-million (U.S.) to get running at about 10,000 tonnes per day, and which would yield about 200,000 ounces of gold per year over its life. The bottom line was therefore attractive -- dream sheets rarely are otherwise -- with a discounted net present value of $1.6-billion (U.S.) after taxes and an internal rate of return of 46 per cent.
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