Mining company finds gold
A junior mining company reported intriguing results this week from a site within view of the fabulously rich Copper Mountain Mine near Princeton.
Vancouver-based Sego Resources on Wednesday released the assay report from four holes it drilled this spring on Miner Mountain.
The richest of those holes showed gold concentrations of 0.86 grams per tonne of ore, which Sego CEO J. Paul Stevenson described as “very, very promising” because the metal showed up consistently over approximately 100 metres of drill cores and proved relatively easy to separate from other material in the samples using chemical extraction techniques.
“But I want to stress that this is a very early stage,” Stevenson said in an interview Friday.
“There is no resource developed. There are no reserves. It’s not a mine. It’s strictly an exploration project at this point.”
Still, the results are encouraging enough for Sego to start planning the resumption of its drilling program in late September.
Sego trades on the TSX Venture Exchange. Its share closed Friday at $0.085, down from $0.10 to the start of the week and about half the 52-week high of $0.16.
The company, which has a memorandum of understanding in place with the Upper Similkameen Indian Band, has spent approximately $5 million exploring Miner Mountain since 2007.
That same year, it received an award from the Mining Association of B.C. for its reclamation work on the site. Stevenson said the work focused on reclaiming bulldozer trenches that were left behind by miners in the 1960s.
It was during the course of that reclamation work on what is a privately owned ranch that Stevenson’s team discovered the gold deposit it’s now chasing.
“It’s one of those classic serendipity mining stories,” said Stevenson.
And, while the company didn’t report any copper in its assay results, its CEO said that’s both a blessing and a curse.
While the presence of large amounts of copper would make for a more viable mine, he explained, small amounts of copper make it more costly to extract gold using chemical processes, thereby making a gold mine less viable.
“So, our joke is that we don’t want to hit a little bit of copper —we want no copper or a lot of copper,” said Stevenson.
Bern Klein, a mining professor at the University of B.C., described Sego’s assay results as “interesting.”
“It definitely deserves more attention,” Klein said in an interview Friday.
“And the proximity to a mine like Copper Mountain could really be advantageous, because it may allow for sending ore to Copper Mountain, and that would significantly reduce the footprint of (a new) mine and take advantage of existing facilities.”
Klein cautioned, though, that Sego’s results are far too preliminary to confirm the prospect of a commercially viable mine.
Miner Mountain is just a few kilometres north of Princeton’s town centre and 15 kilometres north of Copper Mountain Mine, which was Canada’s thirdlargest copper mine when it began production in 2011.
In just the second quarter of this year, Copper Mountain Mine reported production of 25.5 million pounds of copper, 7,627 ounces of gold and 147,973 ounces of silver. It claims proven reserves of 953 million pounds of copper and 548,000 ounces of gold.