Hi Barry:
As a result of the following letter my estimate is 75,000,000 oz
After reading the many postings over the last 18 hours, I did not see that the following was noticed in the "Letters to the Editor" on page A12 of the Globe and Mail dated April 1, 1997 and posted on this thread as a further indicator that the RESERVES are there.
At this late hour I will try and type without missing a line and keeping the spelling mistakes to a minimum.
Keith
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Testing for Gold
As an analytical chemist operating two commercial gold assay laboratories in Ontario, I can seee very little in the media coverage of the Bre-X fiasco thus far which merits the kind of crazed panic which has sent Bre-X stock values plunging and put the market into a tailspin. More information is needed and according to Bre-X's president, David Walsh, it will be forthcoming and vindicating. We'll see.
Despite the foregoing, gold assays on "nuggety ores" ate notoriously unreproducible when assayed by the typical 20- or 30-gram fire-assay technique (used almost universally throughout the gold exploration industry and still very effective on non-nuggety ores). Repeat analyses performed on the same sample of a nuggety ore can show variations up to several hundred per cent and the problem has nothing to do with poor assaying techniques, sample-doping or crooked stock promotors. Rather, it lies in that realm which Winston Churchill aptly described as: There are lies, damned lies and statistics!"
In gold assaying, statistics is a major, albeit unappreciated and often neglected, player. Wherever the expression, "looking for a needle in a haystack" camne from is a mystery but it's a reasonable assumption the phrase was first coined by some unknown farmer worried about his cows getting the point. If he checked all his haystacks by pulling out a single forkful of hay and "analyzing" for needles he would runinto exactly the same problem the gold assayer has with his rock samples.
In nuggety rocks, a 20- or 30-gram "forkful" isn't enough of a sample to get a reliable answer. Most of the assays will show little or no gold with an occasional "bonanza" result caused by a nugget or two getting into the "forkful" of a sample and showing the results way too high.
Overcoming this kind of problem can only be done by taking as large a sample as possible for analysis )in Bre-X's case, this appears to have been 13,000 grams) but doing so usually means a change of assaying method from fire assay to cyanide=leach assay, which handles these very large samples much more economically but , of course, catches the nuggets so easily missed by the small-sample fire assay. Most of the Canadian mining industry currently extracts the gold from their ores using cyanide so it's not a new-fangled or unreliable method if you know what you are doing.
If the current panic is due to 20-gram fire assays failing to produce as much gold as Bre-X's 13,000-gram cyanide leaches, there is indeed some hope for the investors and Mr. Walsh may yet be vindicated. Apternatively, if the panic is due to bad assaying by unskilled assayers, everybody loses. Which raises my last point.
Anyone who wants to can currently hang up his or her shingle as a "Qualified Assayer" and offer their services to an unsuspecting public, no experience or training required. For years, chartered chemists in Ontario have been urging the provincial government to licence ethenprofession of chemistry in an attempt to eliminate bad assayers from the scene.
The Canadian Mineral Analysts have also been examining ways to regulate our industry and give the public and the industry the protection they deserve. I would suggest the time for both is well past due.
Dr. George Duncan, President
Accurassay Laboratories
Kirkland Lake, Ont.
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