Hello Frank
From a fellow poster:
Tanqueray Resources Ltd - Street Wire
SouthernEra finds some hope at Sue
Tanqueray Resources Ltd TQY
Shares issued 29,955,754 Nov 4 2002 close $ 0.08
Tuesday November 5 2002 Street Wire
See SouthernEra Resources Ltd (SUF) Street Wire
by Will Purcell
Chris Jennings's SouthernEra Resources Ltd. continues to plug away at the Yamba Lake project, about 40 kilometres northwest of Ekati, in the hopes of coming up with an economic diamond deposit. Much of its effort this year has been limited to retesting existing finds in the hopes that something had been missed in the initial exploration of the finds, back in the early 1990s. So far, revisiting a number of kimberlites has managed to produce a bit of encouragement in the form of some larger macrodiamonds, but the total diamond counts from the Sue, Sputnik, Eddie and Torrie pipes continue to be modest. Nevertheless, the signs that at least some of the Yamba kimberlites might have a coarse diamond size distribution curve could be enough to keep SouthernEra and its exploration head, Howard Bird, interested in pursuing Yamba diamonds for at least another year.
Mr. Bird, a graduate of McMaster University, has been poking around for diamonds and precious metals for nearly 20 years, joining SouthernEra in 1993, not long after Mr. Jennings took over the company and redirected it at the diamond hunt. He has had his successes along the way, including the Sugarbird pipe in South Africa, but scoring a Canadian success has proven to be a much tougher task for Mr. Bird and SouthernEra. The company spent more than $3-million on the project by the end of last year, with little to show for its efforts.
SouthernEra has thrown more cash at the hunt this year, now coming up with its first rays of hope. The latest sets of diamond counts from the Sue pipe seem to confirm that the pipe has a healthy diamond size distribution, and that could well be enough to elevate the body to the head of the pack of existing kimberlites at Yamba. That is a far different picture than was painted by the initial results obtained in 1993 and 1994 by the initial partners at Yamba, Charlie MacDonald's Tanqueray Resources Ltd. and James Brown's Mill City International Inc. In 1993, the partners processed nearly 100 kilograms of kimberlite, coming up with 14 diamonds, including two macro-sized stones.
That was nothing special. The results were inferior to the numbers obtained from the Torrie pipe, which became the focus at Yamba, but Sue did get another look the following year. A total of 114 kilograms of kimberlite from that program produced just a single microdiamond, and Sue seemed dead as a result. In all, about 210 kilograms of kimberlite had produced just 15 stones, or about 70 diamonds per tonne. With just two macros in the mix, the sample suggested there were just nine macrodiamonds per tonne, with no sign that any of the diamonds were of a toutable size.
The Yamba Lake property has produced some glittering geochemical results through the years, and the original partners have had little difficulty in attracting joint venture partners as a result. The first partner was De Beers, which arrived in 1994 in time to take over the processing of a mini-bulk sample taken from the Torrie pipe. That program proved to be a dismal failure, and the company ultimately decided to abandon the Yamba hunt, but new partners arrived to take up the challenge. Cypango Ventures was the first to give Yamba a go. The company, now known as Techsite Strategies Corp., joined the hunt in 1996 and earned a minority interest in the play, but it was SouthernEra that has doggedly pursued the project for the past four years.
For a time, it seemed that SouthernEra might be ready to call it quits as well, but the company found its second wind this spring, and that led to the revival of the Sue pipe. The company drilled another hole into the body this spring, processing 226.7 kilograms of kimberlite. That rock yielded 95 diamonds, including 18 macro-sized stones; three of them were longer than one millimetre. That sample produced diamonds at the rate of over 400 per tonne, and the macrodiamond count increased to about 80 stones per tonne. Those results were far superior to what had been obtained in the initial programs, although the total diamond count was probably inflated by the use of a smaller minimum cutoff with the latest sample. The 2002 sample used a 0.106-millimetre screen, and although the cutoff used in the early 1990s was not specified, most samples at that time used a 0.15-millimetre limit. Nearly half of the diamonds recovered in 2002 were small enough to fall through such a screen. That doubled the number of stones recovered, but the real story at Sue is the numbers and the sizes of the macrodiamonds.
SouthernEra thought enough of the result that it went back during the summer and drilled three additional holes into the pipe. The diamond counts from those three additional batches of rock from Sue continue to suggest the pipe has a healthy size distribution curve, although the microdiamond haul is somewhat more modest than SouthernEra's first sample provided. The company processed 490 kilograms of kimberlite from the three new holes, coming up with 119 diamonds, including 15 macro-sized stones. In all, 10 of those were two-dimensional macros, and six of them were longer than one millimetre. Three diamonds were longer than one millimetre in two dimensions, and the longest was a healthy 2.6 millimetres long.
In all, SouthernEra has processed 717 kilograms of kimberlite from Sue, coming up with 214 diamonds, including 33 macros. There were 22 two-dimensional macrodiamonds in the parcel, along with nine diamonds longer than one millimetre, and five of the stones were longer than one millimetre in two dimensions. Also helping the cause was the fact that the largest diamond weighed just less than 0.05 carat. The four holes drilled by SouthernEra in 2002 have produced about 300 diamonds per tonne, including just under 50 macros, and there were just over 30 two-dimensional macrodiamonds in a tonne of Sue kimberlite. The pipe produced one-millimetre diamonds at the rate of about 13 stones per tonne, and there were about seven diamonds per tonne that were longer than one millimetre in two dimensions.
In July, Mr. Jennings hailed his first batch of diamond counts as being amongst the most encouraging he had seen from early-stage drilling. Despite Mr. Jennings promotional exuberance, the Sue results pale in comparison with some of the richest finds in Canada's North, but they are superior to the results obtained by other explorers in recent years, which proved to be quite promotable. Ashton's Artemisia kimberlite was largely responsible for igniting the market frenzy surrounding the Coronation diamond play, about 250 kilometres to the north-northwest of Sue. Ashton processed about 332 kilograms of kimberlite, recovering 1,241 diamonds, of which 120 were macro-sized stones. There were 38 two-dimensional macrodiamonds in the parcel, and two of them were longer than one millimetre in two dimensions. Four of the diamonds are believed to have been longer than one millimetre.
Those numbers seemed impressive at a cursory glance to speculators starved for a hot, new diamond play, and investors hopped aboard several promotional bandwagons centred on the Coronation district. The story peaked early this year, just before Ashton revealed that a 1.16-tonne sample from Artemisia had posted a disappointing grade, and interest in the region all but evaporated after Ashton processed another 11 tonnes of rock from Artemisia this spring. The grade of the combined sample was a disappointing 0.11 carat per tonne, and the largest diamond weighed just 0.08 carat. The low grade and the lack of larger diamonds were shocks to speculators who did not see past the stellar microdiamond counts, but the results were well in line with the recoveries of larger diamonds.
That could be encouraging news for Sue, if the SouthernEra results are representative of a substantial portion of the pipe. There were about 3,750 diamonds per tonne in the Artemisia sample, which was more than 12 times the number at Sue, but things get markedly better with the larger diamonds. There were 360 macros per tonne at Artemisia, which is a bit more than seven times the number at Sue, and Artemisia contained just 115 2-D macros per tonne, or a bit under four times the number at Sue. The Artemisia sample contained one-millimetre stones at the rate of about 12 stones per tonne, which was actually a bit less than the number in an equivalent batch of rock from Sue. The Artemisia sample contained about six diamonds per tonne that were longer than one millimetre in two dimensions, and that was also a bit less than what had been found at Sue. Although the microdiamond counts at Artemisia were more than enough to get the market's speculative juices flowing, just a minuscule number of them were large enough to be recovered by the minimum screen used in a mini-bulk sampling program. As a result, based on the size distributions indicated by the diamond counts, Sue could well have a better diamond grade than Artemisia.
Just how much better is hard to say at this stage, but there are encouraging signs to be had from another Ashton find, the Renard-2 pipe in Northern Quebec. Ashton processed 161 kilograms of kimberlitic rock from the body late last year, recovering 145 diamonds. That parcel included 29 macro-sized stones, including five that were macrodiamonds in two dimensions. The best news was that three of the stones were longer than one millimetre in three dimensions.
The Renard-2 diamond recovery worked out to nearly 900 diamonds per tonne, or about triple the number at Sue, and with 175 macros per tonne, the macrodiamond population at Renard-2 was about triple the number found at Sue. The gap seemed to close with larger stones however. There were 30 stones per tonne at Renard-2 that were macrodiamonds in two dimensions. That was equivalent with the recovery at Sue, but the number of stones recovered from Renard seemed unusually low, and that belief was supported by the recovery of still larger diamonds. There were about 18 diamonds per tonne that were longer than one millimetre in two dimensions at Renard-2, which was about 2.5 times the number at Sue. Last spring, Ashton processed 2.44 tonnes of rock from Renard-2, coming up with 1.69 carats of diamonds, suggesting a grade of about 0.70 carat per tonne. The size distribution curve seemed quite healthy, as five of the stones weighed between 0.10 carat and 0.16 carat. The comparison suggests that Sue could have a similar diamond size distribution as Renard-2, although there is no hint that its grade will be a match for that of the Quebec pipe.
There can be large statistical errors in such small samples, and that can make such comparisons quite misleading on occasion, but at this stage, the results seem to suggest that Sue could be the best of the Yamba Lake pipes, with one of the best grades of any find to the northwest of Ekati. That could leave Sue well short of what it would take to be an economic diamond deposit, but the encouraging result now raises the possibility that SouthernEra could be tempted to take a larger sample from Sue next year. The first crack at a mini-bulk test is already in progress, as the company has about one tonne of core that will be run through a processing plant to recover diamonds larger than 0.8 millimetre. If the results are comparable with the latest samples, the rock might yield between four and eight stones, but the sample is too small to provide a definitive answer about the grade of Sue. Meanwhile, SouthernEra was not as lucky with its Sputnik pipe. The company processed 195 kilograms of kimberlite, coming up with 36 diamonds, but just one of the stones seems large enough to be a macrodiamond.
The Sue encouragement brought a brief smile to the faces of Tanqueray's weary shareholders. The stock traded for more than $5 at the peak of the Yamba promotion in the spring of 1994, but a share could be had for just four cents late last month. The counts from Sue carried Tanqueray back above a dime, to an 11-cent close at the end of October, but the stock lost three pennies to start November, closing Monday at eight cents. Meanwhile, the Yamba news had little effect on the shares of SouthernEra, which continue to recover from a brief swoon in early October. The stock added 42 cents Monday, closing at $6.72.
Regards
Vaughn |
