Headquartered in Calgary, Bocana Resources is focused on exploring and developing precious metals assets in South America.
Its primary focus rests on the Escala concession, located in the Sud Lipez Province in Southwestern Bolivia.
Bocana Resources Chief Executive Officer Tim Turner joined The Market Herald’s Simon Druker to discuss the company’s latest achievements.
TMH: To start off with, I know you are a veteran of the Bolivian mining scene, so give us a quick synopsis of Bocana and why your focus lies there.
TT: Bocana really likes Bolivia. I mean it’s an environment of rich natural resources very much like the periodic table. Quite varied. You have a stable government there with President Luis Arce, who’s in his third term as president now and he was the former minister of Finance there for a number of years under the prior administration and he’s hailed as the architect behind Bolivia’s economic transformation and the rapid expansion of the country’s GDP. As a result of those favorable environments there are several Canadian mining companies that are operating in Bolivia now. You have Pan-American Silver, New Pacific Metals, Eloro Resources, Silver Elephant Mining, just to name a few.
TMH: We spoke late last month outside this forum. You issued tender requests at the end of February, you’ve now signed a contract for diamond drilling on the Escala project…tell us what that entails and where it stands.
TT: We issued three tender requests to join companies in the area. Two responded and we selected Leduc Drilling SRL out of La Paz Bolivia. They have a long history of drilling in the area and we’re very impressed with them and have been since we signed the contract with them. So we’re moving forward. Our team’s been mobilized to the site where we’ve been physically marking the spots where we want to get the cores drilled. So we’re ready to go and we should be mobilizing Leduc’s drilling rig here soon.
TMH: What does a successful drill campaign look like there, what is the ideal outcome?
TT: We’re focusing on three areas within the Escala Concession. The Cerro Galapago area is the primary target where the majority of our drilling is going to be. Our geologists have interpreted that this is a host to potentially near large surface porphyry system that likely offers a sizable bulk tonnage drilling target. The only historical drilling completed on this large porphyry target were vertically drilled more towards the center central area that has a high chargeability but a lower resistivity anomaly indication. These areas typically host a lower grade mineralization and are usually not the primary target that you want to test, as opposed to the outer edges of the target area which we are testing and that typically has a higher chargeability and moderate to high resistivities. None of the areas that have been drilled in the past had moderate to high resistivity and charge abilities areas tested but that’s what we’re going to go after.
The second target area is the Cerro Blanco area and our geologists have seen strong structural influence on mineralization in this area and we’ve interpreted it to be sub-vertical to vertical structures that were not properly targeted during previously drilling campaigns. Those campaigns were more vertically drilled and are hard to be an exact on those sub-vertical vertical structures. So that’s a potential to host higher grade mineralization as well. The final area that we want to test has a known history of precious metal based metal veins and the IP geophysical survey located anomaly of high chargeability, high resistivity in that area and we want to test that as well. So to answer your question, a successful drilling campaign would confirm our preliminary opinion that this area is host to a very large near surface porphyry system that offers a large bulk tonnage drill target for us going forward.
TMH: Why are you so confident or excited about Southwest Bolivia, and Escala in particular, the area has seen some historical work before, correct?
TT: Great question, Simon. You’re correct. Historically, there have been several majors that worked out here. You’ve had Barrick Gold, which partnered with Auspac Gold, and they worked together in the Escala area but they only had half of the target area when they couldn’t get the extended concession area from the government the joint venture fell apart. Following that partnership, Normandy Mining, which is an Australian company partnered with a French mining entity LaSource and they too also only had half the area. They did some core drilling, which we have the results from. As I mentioned, those were more centrally located than where you want to target on a porphyry system. What’s interesting, Simon, is that Normandy bought LaSource’s interest in 1999 for $22 million when the price of gold was $324 an ounce approximately and then two years later Newmont came in and bought Normandy.
So, you’ve had a lot of majors out there with very high levels of interest. Now what’s interesting is today Bocana has the entire target area up to 4,000 Hector in size versus the 2,000 that they’ve had in the past and golds above $2,000 an ounce near record territory. So we’ve had a lot of majors very interested in this area in the past. The fact that we have the entire target area now, the favorable geologic reports that we have, today’s higher metal prices, the bulk tonnage potential that we have here, there are a lot of reasons why we’re excited about Bolivia. Those are just a few.
TMH: So I believe drilling is expected to take four to five weeks, what does your exploration and planning look like for the rest of the year?
TT: Well beyond that, once we get the results, we want to review and analyze those results and then potentially we have planned a follow up 3,000-metre drilling campaign just under 10,000 feet that we would like to do possibly later in the fall after we get these results. So, once we get that done and the 3,000-metre drill plan, we’ll look at several other drilling campaigns going forward to really identify this porphyry deposit that we anticipate being there.
TMH: Is there anything else you want to get across to your investors, our viewers right now that we haven’t touched on?
TT: This is a great time to be in the precious metal space with gold above $2,000 hitting record, almost record prices today and silver up upwards of $26 an ounce. I’d like to encourage our investors to go to our website bocanaresources.com. We’ve updated our PowerPoint presentation. We have our geophysical maps, the chargeability resistivity maps, our drill hole locations and the angle and where we want to target. So, I encourage the investors to go there. Also stay involved with Bocana via our LinkedIn page and our Twitter account. We regularly update on that as well.
Tim Turner is the CEO of Calgary-based Bocana Resources. The company trades on the TSX Venture Exchange under the ticker symbol BOCA. You can visit www.bocanaresources.com for more information.
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