Exploration Potential and Drilling
posted on
Aug 24, 2013 04:56PM
CUU own 25% Schaft Creek: proven/probable min. reserves/940.8m tonnes = 0.27% copper, 0.19 g/t gold, 0.018% moly and 1.72 g/t silver containing: 5.6b lbs copper, 5.8m ounces gold, 363.5m lbs moly and 51.7m ounces silver; (Recoverable CuEq 0.46%)
Since the board is not busy, I thought I could bring up some questions regarding exploration potential at SC. I feel this board does not discuss this enough as it can be an interesting topic.
Basically when I first read we decided to do a 2013 drill program at 10,000 metres I thought that was small when looking at the overall size of this deposit. Many companies out there with cash in the bank are doing 20,000-50,000 metre drill programs with rapid progress to drive shareholder value and bring amazing results to their assets. I wish Teck/Copper Fox would have done at least a 20,000 metre program to really show the potential of this deposit. We have the money and right partner in place for such an achievement. Other companies can not justify such extreme drilling programs maybe because:
-the evidence does not support the initiative
-not sufficient geophysical survey mapping and data collection
-low grade mineralization
-Discovery of metal probability low
-etc
But, Copper Fox does have the supportive evidence to drill this deposit to be possibly one of the biggest in the world...What would the value of this company be then? I do not understand why we do not drill this deposit with rapid speeds and progress the expansion of SC in a quick pace, this to me is one huge negative with Copper Fox...They are slow developers and explorers. Sure people can tell me that we are lucky to even be drilling and have money to do a 2013 program in this terrible mining cycle where other juniors wish they had our situation but we are not those other companies. We have the opportunity to explore without worries of bankruptcy and we should take advantage of our situation with aggressive drilling to be part of a limited number of mining companies actively increasing shareholder value. Copper Fox management know what we have but are not in any rush to expedite the process.
In essence to my reflection of exploration potential and the value to discover mineralization at SC I looked at the last four years of Drilling program history of CUU:
2010- 2,000 metre drill program
2011- 8,000 metre drill program
2012- 10,000 metre drill program (Phase 1- 5,000: Phase 2- 5,000)
2013- 10,000 metre drill program (Occurring at the moment)
In 2012, I believe was a good year for results as we proved we had a district but we did not complete the intended plan, as there was no phase 2? Why not? 10,000 metres was not achieved...Why not?
Now what I found extremely positive with our limited drilling history throughout the years of adding value to shareholders was we do not need these huge drill programs to substantially increase the metal resources as from 2010 and 2011 years we added hundreds of millions of metal tonnage (Huge economic value added)! So in regards to Exploration Potential image if we really drilled this deposit with aggressive drilling programs and the possible metal discovery we would encounter?
Food for thought: What do people think SC deposit contains in terms of metal tonnage if SC was fully drilled? 30 million gold? 40 billion copper? 300 million silver? What would the economics/NPV of this asset be then? The numbers are guessing estimates in the event we seriously and aggressively drilled SC for many years and all the numbers are thoughts/opinions that are not to be taken too seriously without drilling evidence. Lastly I will add we wasted last year as improved efforts could have been made to bring us increased value. We should have drilled all outside zones (GK, ES, Mike zones) in concurrent with SC paramount drilling. Who am I to say why we did not, maybe to make Teck do all the work and spend the money I presume, but this adds to the slow pace CUU is taking to bring us value.
Thanks.