George Salamis's Integra Resources Corp. (ITR) lost three cents to $3.15 on 122,000 shares. The company has closed a bought-deal financing in which it sold 6.79 million shares at $2.55 (U.S.) per share. The placement raked in $17-million (U.S.) aided by the underwriters exercising their full overallotment option. The cash, says Mr. Salamis, president and CEO, will go to the company's DeLamar project in southwestern Idaho.
Integra has been drilling ahead of a prefeasibility study expected late this year. The study could prove promotable, as a few weeks ago, the company received assays of up to 12.5 grams of gold and 156.92 grams of silver per tonne over 9.39 metres from the Florida Mountain deposit. There were a few other noteworthy hits, including 24.64 grams of gold and 295 grams of silver per tonne over 5.18 metres and 3.13 grams of gold and 104 grams of silver per tonne over 31.24 metres.
Mr. Salamis cheered his new assays as "some of the thickest and best grades" so far from the project, noting that the consistent high-grade drill intercepts at Florida Mountain are showing strong continuity across multiple vein structures. The company has now hit 92 intervals topping four grams of gold equivalent per tonne over a 1,300-metre strike length and to depths of up to 400 metres.
Integra's coming study will focus on the bulk-tonnage, low-grade, pit-constrained gold and silver resource already delineated, but Mr. Salamis says the company will continue pursuing the high-grade gold through surface drilling, and perhaps from underground later, "if it appears strongly advantageous." In that vein, Integra is -- watch for weasels! -- looking at the "concept of potentially adding high-grade resources to a larger, bulk-tonnage scenario" that "could have the potential to further complement and possibly enhance the future economics and/or production profile of the project."
That scenario was laid out in a maiden preliminary economic assessment two years ago. The study was based on a resource of 172.4 million tonnes measured and indicated at 0.43 gram of gold and 21 grams of silver per tonne, plus another 28.3 million tonnes inferred at slightly lower grades, providing a total of 2.7 million ounces of gold and nearly 130 million ounces of silver. (The bulk of the resource resides in the DeLamar deposit, with about three-quarters of the value, the rest sits within the nearby Florida Mountain deposit.)
Integra's dream sheet proposed a 27,000-tonne-per-day mine that would run for 10 years as a heap-leach operation based on oxide and transitional ore, augmented by a concurrent six-year run with a 2,000-tonne-per-day mill processing deeper, unoxidized rock. The $213-million (U.S.) mine plan called for production of 103,000 ounces of gold and 1.66 million ounces of silver annually, and it generated a promising bottom line, with a discounted net present value of $472-million (U.S.) after taxes.
At the time, Mr. Salamis applauded the "strong premise for an extraordinary high-margin and long-life mining operation," but he quickly segued into dismissing the study as "simply a starting point for us" in terms of further value enhancement. The coming prefeasibility study should show how far Integra has jumped from its starting block.
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