from stockwatch 2022-06-15 17:52 ET - Market Summary
by Will Purcell
The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score on Wednesday was an upbeat 104-85-121 as the TSX Venture Exchange rose five points to 655.
Grenville Thomas and Ken Armstrong's North Arrow Minerals Inc. (NAR) lost one cent to nine cents on 5,000 shares. While the wait goes on for the last results from the company's 2,000-tonne test of the Q1-4 kimberlite, just north of Naujaat in central Nunavut, North Arrow is blowing the dust of its long idle Pikoo diamond project, east of La Ronge in Northern Saskatchewan. If all goes to plan, the first drill program in several years could take place on the project, which has already produced several diamondiferous kimberlites.
There are more kimberlite discoveries to be made, cheer Mr. Armstrong, president and chief executive officer, and Mr. Thomas, the company's chairman who was best known for his staking and discovery of what became the Diavik mine in the early 1990s. While Pikoo has gone undrilled since the mid-2010s, the project did see surface sampling last fall. Although the indicator counts were still pending at last report, North Arrow already has enough "unique and unsourced kimberlite indicator mineral trains" with targets at their heads ready to be drilled.
North Arrow has discovered 10 kimberlites on the property so far, starting with its first drill program in 2013. That effort produced the PK-150 kimberlite, a small body that shocked the market -- and probably the company as well -- when diamond counts from 210 kilograms of kimberlite tallied 745 gems. Most were tiny, but 23 of them were commercial-sized diamonds that weighed 0.282 carat, a hefty 133 carats per hundred tonnes.
More drilling followed, with additional holes completed in 2015 and 2016. In the end, North Arrow processed a total of 582 kilograms and recovered 1,308 microdiamonds, a haul that included 33 commercial-sized stones weighing 0.488 carat. The resulting grade, 84 carats per hundred tonnes, was not as flashy as first suggested but it still ranks as the best grade produced in any Canadian province west of Quebec.
The problem, unfortunately, is the size of PK-150. While it has a strike length of 150 metres and is traceable for 200 metres, and could be open beyond that, its width is narrow, between 10 and 15 metres across. To this point, North Arrow has said little about the geometry of the body at depth, but those dimensions, even from an optimistic view, suggest the body contains fewer than one million tonnes of kimberlite, unless there are substantial, as yet undetected, blows along its length.
While four other Pikoo kimberlites were tested and found to carry microdiamonds, none of them yielded anything more than a smattering of micros, specks smaller than the width of a human hair. Further, there was nothing in the details to suggest that any of those finds were large enough to be of interest had they carried a bounty of diamonds -- certainly not like the mushroom-capped behemoths farther south at FalCon, in the Fort a la Corne district.
FalCon, recall, is home to dozens of huge kimberlites, including two with a few hundred million tonnes of kimberlite each, enough to hold over 60 million carats according to the most recent calculation. While the grades are modest, at 15 carats per hundred tonnes, the coarse size distribution curve and quality of the gems has RTEC contemplating a multibillion-dollar mine. Further, there are several other pipes of interest at FalCon, each as large or larger, although with lesser grades.
North Arrow's Pikoo has none of those qualities -- size, coarse size frequency or value -- yet, but Mr. Armstrong sees enough promise to get back to work. The summer drilling program is slated to test several other anomalies, presumably including ones identified through the company's recent till sampling program. The good news is that the company's crew apparently have a good idea of what geophysical targets to test, as their previous drilling success rate has been unusually good at Pikoo.