Visited the Taranna Finanshul Fourem this Sunday aft and there was a thin dissolute crowd of retirees and day traders looking for free sandwiches. TD Waterous looked forlorn, no doubt wondering why it was not being besieged as the trading solution at 35 bucks a trade and no software, and Yankee TA education meisters hawked wares like Ed McMahon at a Carnival.
All alone in a corner with the occasional passerby giving a glance, were two lone miners, Brightstar and CZZ - or Canadian Royalties, cash bloated, with 14 million dollars in the bank and Raglan nickel-copper core. The CZZ people had a bright energetic speaker who talked to a tiny audience that day about the project, past and present. The brokerage community may have had one or two guys I knew show up. Seething with negativity.
Seems CZZ has hired Stratchcona, of Bre-X exposure fame to water down their claims. They seem to think they can declare 1 million tons of high grade material, some of it making 3 percent nickel, some of it over one ounce palladium. Looks like 300 dollar per ton raw value overall and the one million ton figure is conservative.
The have 31 kilometres of likely strike and two discoveries. They have been concentrating on massive sulphides and maybe that is overall strategically not the total answer. They have one more hole coming in massive suphides from the new area of Keho, Kelo lake area, which has not yet been assayed. The Giraffe area of disseminated sulphides was not considered great with lower grade sulphides and so-so PGM's, but this may not be that bad. Traditionally, the PGM's associate with disseminated sulphides, not the massive nickel copper bearing ones. Inco and Falconbridge, their business being base metals could not segue into being platinum miners alone. (as they were forced practically at Shebandowan to be) This made them ignore Pt, and Palladium by themselves or as they may occur by themselves, without economic copper or nickel accompanying as primary ores -- for over 75 years. In turn, this attitude crippled the potential Platinum metals industry of North America, and allowed the South Africans with their Merensky Reef, with "Pt only", to dominate.
But here we have a junior who may or may not come up with the requisite 5 or more million tons of near surface ore to make a base metal mine or concentrate maker, but if they tried, could ignore the base metals and find a Platinum resource worth a small flotation mill and underground operation. Sort of a Tidewater Timmins Nickel. They could do this by concentrating on the areas that may kick Pt in the rear and may or may not find NI-Cu in great gobs. Neither philosophy is guaranteed to be the answer, as either base metal or Pt predominance may, or may not exist, but for a junior right now, if the Pt is there, it is the preferred independent's target. Sherritt might take their concentrates through the Churchill port, a hop skip and a jump. They might even finance.
The ex Band-Ore geo, Durham, thinks he knows where the PGM's associates with reference to the massive sulphides. This is hopeful that an associated PGM play could be wrung out of a pure "let's chase the high grade conductors" thing. BTW, the high grade conductors were not all mag highs, which explains why Mesamax was not found in the 60's and also why there is much more target potential left in the tundra.
They are 15 Kliks from the Falco airport, of the Raglan copper-nickel thing that will still be mined when your grandchildren are dead. Tidewater is right there. Building a concentrator would not be that expensive. You do not have to magnify costs by a latidudinal multiplier that is only theoretic, not actual.
The ball is still in play. I hope they chase the geology of Pt a bit more, and the economics of small scale concentration of the stuff, that is easily achievable for an independent. The Yanks did it in all sorts of small ~3 million ton Alaskan porphyries for PGM's. No reason not to try here. The word they are whispering on the geology is Norilsk. They are saying it is more like the Russian-Finn stuff than another Raglan. I don't know about that. It looks like Sudbury Ore to me. But whatever the geological association, they have to bang in a bunch of holes til they find an economic key or it stops making sense.
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