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Gold/Mining/Energy : ECU Silver Mining Inc -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: zoo york who wrote (668)	5/27/2006 11:31:49 AM
From: zoo york	Respond to of 672

More notes on the drilling: Michel says that about 70% of the current drilling program is targeting the near surface vein system that they are already working. Considering that Asarco, the company formaly operating the mines, mined the Terneras Vein system for over 1.5 km strike length and down to 500m depth, there is a great deal of potential still ahead for ECU to further extend the resource in the mines we are currently working. I was able to see the stopes from the mined out zones and they are only about half a meter wide, yet they run for hundreds of meters uninterupted. It is amazing that a company could extract such a large tonnage so surgically such a long time ago. Asarco was only interested in the oxide material, which was easier to process using the best recovery practices of the day. They stopped working when they encountered the water table since the ore transitioned to sulphides at that depth. A large north-south trending post mineralization fault structure bisects the entire property, and the adjacent rock was displaced by this fault about 30m laterally, and about 200m lower. Past miners were unable to find the continuity of the vein system on the other side of the fault, but Michel has been able to do so, and produced some fantastic grades in the process. So we know there are several near surface vein extensions to define with further drilling, and the veins are remarkably continuous along their strike, with high grade ore to be had along widths that ECU have proven can be profitably mined. Michel believes there is the potential to add more than another million tons to the net resource. While I was in the lower levels of the Santa Juana mine, I noticed a big difference in the vein structure than what was exposed since my last visit just 15 months ago. The veins are now several meters in width, very economic to mine with limited dilution, and the veins are also much closer together. This is a much less challenging operating environment for the company. The geologist that was guiding me through the project also explained that the waste rock between the veins also contains lower grades of precious and base metals, and they are processing this material as 'development ore' when they drive the adits and drifts to reach the veins. This development ore yields enough metals to effectively pay for the underground work that must be completed to get to the real money zones. The remaining 30% of the current drilling program is targeting the skarn system at depth. The problem here is that the drill that ECU is using may not be suited to ideally test at great depth. The progress is very slow and they average only about 50m per day and a more powerful drill will be required. Keep in mind that drilling is not as simple as just point-and-shoot. The drill rods will buckle and stick in different hardness of rock structure. Longer length drilling will often deflect and shear from the intended target zone. Ideally, once a drill is set up, you want to do a 'fan' program where several cores are extracted from the same origin, each aimed at a different angle of penetration. Also, you want to intercept an ore body as close to perpendicular as possible, so that you can establish the true magnitude. If you plunge a drill core straight down the middle of a vein, you get very little useful information about the true size of the structure. Or, you could end up drilling parallel to a vein, and never intercept it at all. So completed a drill core angled to 40 degrees, and 60%, and then at 85% degrees, will hopefully hit the target structure on each attempt, and then geologists can interpret that information to get an idea of the character of the veins, the width, and since the wider angles will by definition plunge to greater depths, they can have an indication of how far the structure plunges. The last drill core that reached the skarn ended in mineralization. It was a high angle drill core, and it probably ran straight into the skarn 'pipe' without extending to the other side. It is great news to know that this has confirmed that the skarn extends at least 500m below the original intercept, but we want to know how wide it is at that point. So to get that info, the drill rig will have to be moved laterally, so they can drill to depth at a lower angle and hopefully find a much wider interval. One final point... One of the skarn cores seems to have just penetrated along the edge of the zone. It has several intervals of pure skarn, and several intervals of the diorite intrusive, and a bit of everything. People often assume that an ore body is just a nice, well defined linear structure that is easy to see and can be neatly drawn on a map. In actual fact they are irregular, discontinuous, and non-linear. It will take a hell of a lot of drilling to get enough data from enough different access points to define exactly what we have. And that is a good problem to have. With such a potentially large ore body, we will probably need to do another 10,000m of drilling at depth just to prove up the cap of the skarn system, maybe 20-25 million tons. Michel believes a higher grade core will be found in this large mass of skarn, somewhere in the middle of the deposit. To hit that we will have to drive quite a few cores into the structure, and follow a trail of higher grades to get to the 'core'. This zone could be the kind of bonanza grades that will get the attention of the entire PM sector when we are lucky enough to find it. And it will be a very large area, but still represent only a fraction of the total area deposit. We have a lot to look forward to in the months ahead... cheers! COACH247