Tres-Or tries again at Timiskaminganother Streetwire article from Stockwatch
Tres-Or tries again at Timiskaming
2003-05-13 12:03 ET - Street Wire
by Will Purcell
Laura Lee Duffett's Tres-Or Resources Ltd. has come up with enough cash to get an exploration program going on its Notre Dame du Nord diamond play in the northwestern corner of Quebec, just northeast of Lake Timiskaming. In addition to the Quebec portion of the play, Tres-Or has a significant land position on the Ontario side of the district, along with two junior partners that are paying the bills to earn a stake in significant portions of the Tres-Or claims. The hunt for gems in the area near the Timiskaming rift has gone on for decades and there have been many diamondiferous kimberlites found through the years in the area surrounding New Liskeard, including three on ground that is now held by Tres-Or in Quebec. None of the early discoveries yielded enough diamonds to sustain any of the earlier promotions, but there have been some recent glimmers of hope that one of the finds near New Liskeard might have a richer zone that is worth a closer look.
As a result, there has been renewed interest in a region that first attracted Tres-Or early in 2001, about a year after Ms. Duffett, a Vancouver-based and Carleton University-trained geologist, took over as president of the company. Tres-Or's first and largest stake in the region is about 60 kilometres south of the Quebec play, in the Temagami area. Although that area has produced some encouraging early results, all of the earlier diamondiferous discoveries have been west and northeast of Lake Timiskaming. Still, it will likely take some promotable diamond counts from Tres-Or or one of its rivals to spark the same amount of interest that the Timiskaming play stirred up during its heyday in the early 1990s.
Ms. Duffett, a consulting geologist who has also worked on the business and investor relations side of things, has been finding the Lake Timiskaming region a tough promotion, but it was a far different story a decade ago, when Pierre Gauthier's KWG Resources Inc. and Spider Resources Inc. managed to sell the notion of Timiskaming diamonds to an eager market. Mr. Gauthier was far from the first to take up the hunt however. De Beers once had high hopes for the area, and in the early 1980s, the South African diamond major was suitably enthused about some till samples that it had collected in the area just north of the Lake. One of the samples is believed to have returned over 600 indicator mineral grains, and subsequent geophysical surveys came up with a promising target.
That led to a kimberlite find, about 25 kilometres east-northeast of New Liskeard, when De Beers drilled what is now known as the Guigues, or GU-1, kimberlite in 1983. The body is thought to be quite large, measuring up to 400 metres in length and just over 200 metres wide, and the geophysical surveys were suggestive of a pipe with two lobes. The company was its usual secretive self at Guigues, and little is known about its exploration program, although it seems clear that De Beers did not see enough potential to keep going, although the kimberlite contained an array of indicator minerals, with glimmers of geochemical hope.
Nearly a decade later, Mr. Gauthier's companies decided to take another crack at the project. KWG and Spider drilled out about 22.5 tonnes of kimberlite from the northern lobe of Guigues, but the mini-bulk test produced just a solitary macro-sized diamond that measured two millimetres in length and about one millimetre wide. That stone likely weighed less than 0.01 carat, making the indicated grade of the sample too minuscule to bother touting. Nevertheless, the kimberlite in the northern lobe did produce an array of indicator minerals that included chrome diopsides, chromites and pyrope garnets, although the proportion of G-10 garnets is believed to have been fairly low.
There were notable differences between the kimberlite in the northern lobe, and the relatively untested southern portion of Guigues. The northern material was classified as hypabyssal kimberlite, while the rock in the southern lobe is believed to be a tuffaceous kimberlite that also contained an assortment of indicator minerals, although the diamond content of that portion of Guigues is an unknown.
Although there is good reason to believe that the large pipe has multiple phases of kimberlite, with possible higher-grade zones lurking within the body, it would be quite a shock if the Guigues pipe has anything more than a modest diamond content at best. Tres-Or could be mulling over the prospect of taking a third look at the pipe, but at this stage at least, the most notable aspect of Guigues is the diamondiferous hope it offers for several untested targets to the northeast of New Liskeard, on Tres-Or's 100-per-cent-owned claims.
There is a second diamondiferous kimberlite on Tres-Or's ground, which offers additional hope for the untested anomalies. KWG and Spider turned up the Troika kimberlite in 1994, just east of the Ontario border, about 20 kilometres northeast of New Liskeard and about 15 kilometres northwest of the Guigues pipe. The new find was also quite large, covering about a dozen hectares, and as its name suggested, Troika appeared to have three lobes, which could be separate pipes. In the summer of 1994, a 22-kilogram sample of kimberlite from Troika produced 22 microdiamonds. Mr. Gauthier's promotion quickly gathered steam, but later that year, when several new and larger samples proved to be nearly barren, KWG and Spider spun the disappointing results as inconclusive.
By then, Mr. Gauthier's primary diamond promotion had moved off to the Attawapiskat region of Northern Ontario, and the Quebec play drifted off to sleep. In 2000, Canabrava Diamond Corp. reinvented the play as its Frontenac project, and the company drilled several new holes into the Troika pipe, which it referred to as FP-2, in the hopes of duplicating that first microdiamond success. Canabrava initially had high hopes for its resurrected play, but samples that apparently weighed more than 200 kilograms produced what a disappointed Canabrava sloughed off as "trace quantities of microdiamonds," and the company was quick to move on.
Although Troika clearly seems to have a very low diamond content, the elevated microdiamond count of the first test offers hope that at least one phase of kimberlite might have a greater amount of diamonds. The one richer sample came from the southwestern lobe of the pipe, but it is not clear just how well the other lobes of the Troika anomaly had been tested. Much like Guigues, the Troika kimberlite produced an array of indicator minerals, but for the most part, the diamond content of the two bodies seemed marginal at best.
A third body had been found just to the northwest of Troika. The feature, originally known as NDN-2 and dubbed FP-2 by Canabrava, was tested in 2000 with a single drill hole, which encountered about 50 metres of coarse-grained macrocrystic kimberlite that also contained just a trace of microdiamonds. KWG and Spider also tested the body several years earlier, but those first samples apparently were barren.
Touting the earlier finds was a key part of Tres-Or's opening promotional salvos, but the company will likely concentrate its efforts on coming up with new finds, rather than attempting to repackage Mr. Gauthier's old story a third time. The property has been covered by a regional magnetic survey, flown at a 200-metre spacing, which should be good enough to identify larger kimberlite targets, and the Quebec government conducted a stream sediment survey over the ground in the early 1990s. The Guigues and Troika kimberlites can be identified using a combination of geophysics and geochemistry, and Tres-Or believes that the existing data will help it select some drillable targets.
Several of those existing targets are on ground that had been picked over by Mr. Gauthier's companies, as well as De Beers, but some are thought to lie on ground owned by the Timiskaming First Nation, which has likely seen little if any diamond work. That new ground seems to be in a favourable location. The western boundary of the reserve is just metres east of the Troika discovery, and it covers an area about five kilometres from east to west and seven kilometres from north to south, within 10 kilometres of the Guigues pipe as well.
There have been several diamondiferous kimberlites found to the west and south of New Liskeard as well, and a few of them offer hope to the Quebec play, as well as to the Temagami North project that is being worked by Tres-Or and Rock Resources Ltd. The Bucke pipe, about four kilometres southwest of New Liskeard, has seen the most exploration through the years, but a KWG mini-bulk sample produced an unpromotable grade of 0.004 carat per tonne. Despite that minuscule result, NovaWest Resources tried its hand at reviving the play a few years ago, without much success.
Not all of the finds have produced microscopic quantities of diamonds. One of the old finds has a decent shot at attracting some new interest in the Timiskaming region. The 95-2 kimberlite was discovered by Sudbury Contact Mines Ltd. in the mid 1990s, and although it was never promoted, it appears to be the best of the Timiskaming lot. The revival of 95-2 offers encouragement to explorers across the region for a number of reasons. Although the initial diamond counts from 95-2 were decidedly modest, there were clear signs that the sample had a coarse diamond size distribution, and the pipe seemed reasonably large. Despite that, Sudbury Contact gave up on its diamond play for several years, until it took up the hunt again last year.
There have been several more samples collected form 95-2, and a core area of the pipe appears to have a toutable diamond content. So far, just over 2.1 tonnes of material from the better portions of 95-2 have yielded 219 diamonds, including 30 two-dimensional macrodiamonds and 13 stones that were longer than one millimetre. Some of those stones were large enough that they would have been recovered in a mini-bulk sampling program, and the largest ones weighed a total of about one-quarter carat, suggesting a diamond content of about 0.11 carat per tonne.
The 95-2 sample is far too small to reach any conclusions about grade, but the result is clearly sufficient to warrant a closer and larger look. The body was originally thought to be about 250 metres long and 150 metres wide, but it now appears somewhat larger than that. The diamond count variations within the distinct kimberlite facies within 95-2 is another sign that it would be reasonable to expect significant variations in diamond content across the Timiskaming region, and within the pipes themselves.
Sudbury Contact plans more work on its diamond play this year, but it has been rival Rock Resources that seemed most eager to promote the 95-2 results, as the pipe lies within a few kilometres of some of the Temagami North property, where Rock is earning a two-thirds stake from Tres-Or.
There could be some more encouragement from 95-2 in the coming months that could provide a bit of a boost, but Tres-Or and its partners in the region will have to come up with some hope of their own to get the Timiskaming promotions rolling in a meaningful way. Tres-Or's shares have traded in a range near the 25-cent mark since the company's initial move to gems helped carry its stock to a 39-cent peak in 2001. Tres-Or gained two cents Friday and remained unchanged on Monday, at 22 cents.