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To: AuBug who wrote (124879)	7/23/2008 10:17:13 AM
From: Michael Mc Donough	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 313969

Someone mentioned on the s/h thread that it is too swampy to drill in that area. I agree on the comment that we seem to have been hit with this wildcat hole to the south and are paying for it.

To: AuBug who wrote (124879)	7/23/2008 10:55:23 AM
From: E. Charters	Respond to of 313969

That would be my first guess. Two holes at once normal in both directions. 700 metres is a baby step out in coal. Usually you can go much further than that. I would step out 1K normal to the connection line and drill two holes at once halving my chances of missing. (Normal means at 90 degrees to the line you draw between the hit holes.) A few coal basins are margins of lakes or seas. In that respect they could be elongated but the widths are usually miles. If you look at the old maps of the coal measures of the US you see that they cover about 30% of the land mass of the Continental US. (See the bottom) It is usual to hit coal if you drill straight down. The trick is to find it thickened, unparted by mud/sand rock seams and close enough to surface if flat lying, or in repeated beds close enough together to surface mine if steeply dipping. Complications are salt diapirs, intrusions, folds, faults and erosion of both top and bottom paleo surfaces of the coal bed. When you get into the Mountainous regions folding and faulting so complicates the stuff it is like drilling in the Archean. GXS got extraordinarily lucky to find coal that close to surface near a rail line a road, and that grade of coal at today's prices. SK is famous for its lignite, but has not a single Bituminous deposit exploited. And of course we had a hand in it. Without SI, they would never have found it. I posted a jocular diagram about GXS running into a tail of a large deposit that was only a few tens of metres wide, showing how their initial regular grid probe holes would miss the deposit every time as the main mass would be further east. (They would also miss if in fact the deposit was one seam dipping south or north at even 15 degrees.) It was just meant as a joke, but in fact you can't tell much about a deposit by drilling in one dimension. That is all they have is one dimension right now. The second group of holes hit different rocks entirely. In fact the deposit does not have to have a regular shape. If it were formed in valleys that run east east (the erosional pattern of the Pasquia hills to the west makes valleys east west for instance and while later in geologic time it may have been imprinted on earlier similar features) -- then in that case the frequency of the buried valleys running that way could be very hard to discern. A nightmare hole pattern could hit every ridge exactly on, or another at some odd frequency could hit 1/2 the actual thickened valleys and the actual amount of thickened coal would be vastly underestimated. In fact swamps form in that way in some environments sometimes although sedimentary terranes do not usually have this kind of sharp hill and valley ridging, called basin and range. You have to remember that companies have just about gone belly up with fabulous Coal resources. Teck nearly floundered on a big coal mine until they got it straight as to the real structure a while back, and others running into billions of tons of metallurgical coal in Canada have also had a bad time in the past going into receivership. It ain't always easy. GXS looks easier than most if the thickness holds out. At 80 metres deep they need a fair bit of coal to make it work. I don't think 2 metres of coal will make it in the market. They have to make 10 dollars a ton or it is really hungry IMHO. North America has enough coal to supply their energy needs for 30,000 years. It would behoove us to find a use for this fuel such that it does not threaten the environment as it forms a useful solution to the energy-cost equation for some time to come. Perhaps the greens who want to bury coal are forcing us into solutions that are not tenable or perhaps not in the long run as environmentally friendly either. To imagine all nuclear reactors will remain safe for the next ten thousand years and not Chernobyl on us is to use a pretty dull imagination. Here are the problems we think we have to solve now vis a vis coal mining and its utilization energy. * release of carbon dioxide and methane, both of which are greenhouse gases, which are causing climate change and global warming according to the IPCC. Coal is the largest contributor to the human-made increase of CO2 in the air. * waste products including uranium, thorium, and other heavy metals * acid rain * interference with groundwater and water table levels * impact of water use on flows of rivers and consequential impact on other land-uses * dust nuisance * subsidence above tunnels, sometimes damaging infrastructure * rendering land unfit for other uses. * coal-fired power plants without effective fly ash capture are one of the largest sources of human-caused background radiation exposure. **************************************** If should be noted that the world is running out of good Metallurgical coal rather quickly and for this reason people are going to PCI techniques which allow furnaces to use lower grade coal to make steel. I do know of an Anthracite deposit in the Arctic that is on surface and near tidewater. I don't know about its tonnage or quality but there is a fair chance that there may be grade in that area that has economic features for shipment to steel mills, as if all you have to do is surface dig and ship from near shore that is fairly cheap even in the Arctic. ******************************************** Coal areas of the Continental US.** Key

To: AuBug who wrote (124879)	7/23/2008 11:38:11 AM
From: Veteran98	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 313969

Pursuant to my previous comments on the junior markets Message 24735079 Don't dismiss manipulation either. As I've mentioned I've been successfully playing junior markets for many years now and I've noticed a frustrating change and the major change is that institutional money and big players are often involved in many junior situations and in many cases these players have their own agenda. They have huge positions and in many cases they are able to swing the market in the direction that they want and I'm sure whatever direction they swing the market in they are lining their pockets. In the case of GXS I wouldn't at all discount that many of the big boys missed the play altogether and the hole was intentionally drilled knowing that it would likely miss and the intent was to whack the market so that the big boys could get in while they are fleecing the retail investors who are now panicking. Maybe I'm paranoid but I'm seeing manipulation in many plays and you can bet your bottom dollar it isn't going to be the big boys who are left holding the bag. They are selling as they are pumping and they are buying as they are spreading nasty rumours. In the case of GXS who knows what the agenda is but you can bet that many retail investors are crapping themselves and bailing out and if GXS has a huge rebound it's because the big money has climbed on board cheap and it's to their advantage to move GXS higher. Big money doesn't give a shit about the little guy. Sometimes it's not only what can go wrong will go wrong but it seems that more and more the market is manipulated and it goes wrong because it's on the agenda of the big boys with big money playing the swings.