FROM THE SAME DUDE THAT BROUGHT YOU ALL IPMCF, HERE'S HIS NEXT PICK. Can someone please ship me what this (JAY TAYLOR) guy is smoking.....LOL
The Northern Miner Vol. 84 No. 17
June 22-28, 1998
Sample tampering cited as likely at Bumbat-West
project
By James Whyte
A year ago, after a site visit to the Bumbat and Bumbat-West
gold projects in Mongolia, The Northern Miner reported that
"possible tampering" might explain why Mongolia Gold
Resources (MGR-V) was unable to duplicate previously
reported high-grade results from the Bumbat-West discovery.
Also noted at that time was the lack of quartz veining and
mineralization in a trenched exposure of the discovery area.
Company officials criticized these comments as a rush to
judgment, stating that "inadvertent contamination" at the
Mongolian lab or a screw-up whereby the lab "swapped the
samples with somebody else's" were equally legitimate
possible conclusions.
"All of the data is in the company's possession, including
reject materials from the analyses," President Dave Webb
reassured investors last summer.
"The company wishes to clearly understand what the
discrepancies are and how they occurred, and to this end has
contracted a well-experienced independent Canadian
professional engineer to assist in this manner."
In early March of 1997, Mongolia Gold reported the
discovery of a large, well-defined gold-in-soil anomaly at
Bumbat West, then known as the Naimgan zone. This
regional exploration program coincided with efforts to
develop the Bumbat mine as a small underground operation
exploiting the 118 vein.
The mine has since failed to live up to expectations and was
shut down at the end of 1997. The company's 51% partner,
local company Mongolyn Alt, is now attempting to sell its
interest in the project.
The original sampling program at Bumbat-West was
supervised by two geologists, Igor Tchajkov (a
Russian-Canadian) and M. Enkhbold (a Mongolian), and
employed three local students as samplers. The survey
returned positive results from 228 of the 1,750 soil samples.
The gold concentrations averaged 4.25 grams gold per tonne,
with the highest running 62.5 grams. The 100 highest gold
values averaged 9.9 grams gold. The discovery area was
described as 1,700 metres long and at least 200 metres wide,
and open in all directions.
More samples, 500 metres to the northeast of the zone,
returned what the company decribed as "abundant
anomalous gold values [that] may indicate an extension of
the zone in that direction."
The news release emphasized that the samples were
analyzed by two methods at a certified laboratory in British
Columbia. It said both methods -- an aqua-regia digestion
followed by emission spectrometry, and an aqua-regia
digestion followed by graphite-furnace absorption
spectrometry -- resulted in similar values.
Later, Mongolia Gold reported that it had taken a bulldozer
with a ripper tooth and opened a single 200-metre-long
trench in the discovery area. All the assays results were
encouraging; four of nine graded more than 0.5 gram per
tonne, and the richest contained 11.3 grams per tonne.
By May, the trenching program was complete and 3,850
samples -- 750 of them rock, and the rest soil -- had been
prepared at the Mongolian government's Central Geological
Laboratory in Ulaanbaatar. The pulps were flown to
Vancouver, B.C., for analysis at Acme Analytical, a reliable
assayer.
By late June, partial results were in the company's hands,
and the news was not good. Virtually all of the analyses
showed low gold contents, but the company decided to wait
for the whole set of analyses to come back, and to examine
the quality-control results, before releasing the news.
But Mongolia Gold kept a brave face on: it engaged a driller
for a program on Bumbat West, to start "immediately." The
company also applied for, and was granted, an enlarged
licence area "to provide for better coverage of the newly
discovered Bumbat West Zone."
July rolled around, and all the results were in. "With rare
exception," said a July 4 news release signed by David
Webb, "all of the samples contained very low gold values." A
set of 60 samples had been sent to a second lab as a check:
they "confirmed the overall low gold content" in the main
body of samples.
The press release said it expected results from the drill
program shortly.
It also said that sample rejects, the crushed sample left over
from the first stage of the preparation process, are "being
held for further examination." This was not exactly correct.
While it was never announced in the press releases, the
company had hired Westcoast Mineral Testing, a consulting
firm led by mining engineer Gary Hawthorn, to investigate
the mineralogy of the samples. At the same time that Webb
was delivering an assurance that the sample rejects had been
retained, Hawthorn was trying to find them.
A locked container in Ulaanbaatar, supposed to be the place
where the rejects were stored, did not have them. Hawthorn
looked elsewhere but ultimately had to settle for pulps that
had been kept by Acme in Vancouver.
Webb had also told Hawthorn that written instructions on
keeping rejects had been issued to the Central Geological
Laboratory, but the company's copy of the letter has never
appeared.
Hawthorn's first step was to have a second B.C. lab, CDN
Resource Laboratory, run the pulps again. CDN confirmed
Acme's numbers. Hawthorn next examined the pulps by
panning and microscopy, confirming that much of the gold in
the pulps resembled gold from sands in the Zamaar Valley, a
nearby river valley with an active placer-gold operation.
Hawthorn's investigation then concentrated on the Bumbat
West area. Repeat samples from the trench were found to
contain little gold, but also carried much less black sand (a
common, and tell-tale placer constituent) than had the earlier
samples Hawthorn retrieved from Acme. Samples taken at
the local placer workings by Enkhbold, the Mongolian
geologist, yielded similar gold grains to the "discovery" pulps.
In coming to his conclusions, Hawthorn considered an earlier
incident in which Enkhbold, suspicious of the results at
Bumbat West, told both Tchajkov and another Mongolian
geologist, Enkhbold's superior at Mongolyn Alt, that the
samplers had, out of laziness, collected "soil" samples at the
Bumbat placer. Enkhbold also said he had later brought up
the problem with Mongolia Gold's chairman, Edward
Kennedy, when Kennedy visited the site. Tchajkov disagreed
with Enkhbold's account, and one of the samplers also
denied the allegation. Hawthorn considered it unlikely that
rejects would then go missing if all that had happened was
phony sampling.
The second possibility Hawthorn credited was that there was
a systematic plan to replace original soil samples with
material from the Bumbat and Zamaar Valley placer
deposits. He said that in either event, there was no question
that the Bumbat West samples contained placer gold.
The Bumbat mine also appears to have its problems. In
January of this year the plant was shut down to replace the
liners in the rod mill, at which time Mongolyn Alt gave notice
that it intended to sell its 51% interest. The mine and mill are
currently on care-and-maintenance.
Grade problems have plagued the mine; early prefeasibility
work by Cominco Engineering Services estimated the grade
at 13.9 grams per tonne, but at startup the mill feed ran about
5 grams. Curiously, Cominco also identified spotty and
erratic grades -- a problem it blamed on nugget effect.
Cominco only recommended that Mongolia Gold install a
portable plant to process a bulk sample.
Mongolia chose instead to go ahead with production at a
daily rate of 300 tonnes, and began processing stockpiled
muck from Bumbat's 118 Vein in August 1997. The last
available production figures from Bumbat show that between
August 1997 and the shutdown at year-end, the mill had
handled 18,000 tonnes of feed with an average head grade of
3.7 grams per tonne, pouring 915 oz. of gold and retaining a
flotation concentrate with a further 340 oz. in inventory.
Dilution has been fingered as the cause of the low grades,
which are 27% of the company's pre-production estimate.
The erratic grades noted by Cominco suggest substantial
coarse gold is in the material; unusually erratic gold grades
often result from coarse gold. Similarly, the high recovery
reported from Bumbat's gravity circuit ly around 85% --
suggests the presence of coarse, liberated gold in the feed.
Mongolia Gold's cause has been taken up recently by
newsletter writer and desert-dirt proponent Jay Taylor, who
sees a target price of $2.20 for the 12 cents stock, and
describes the project as "not only a pleasant surprise, but
downright exciting."
MM
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