Bezant Wraps Up Drilling At The Sizeable Mankayan Copper-Gold Prospect, And Will Now Get To Work On The Economics
By Alastair Ford
minesite.com
Bernard Olivier has proved himself fairly adept at keeping his London investors in the loop as to what’s going on with his copper-gold exploration company Bezant Resources. On his latest trip to town he delivers a strong reassurance that operationally-speaking, progress on the company’s Mankayan licence in the Philippines is on track. The latest round of drilling there, on the Guinaoang porphyry copper-gold deposit, has now finished, and the rig is leaving site. In an interesting aside, Bernard mentions that one final “wild-card” hole in a southern corner of the Mankayan property will be drilled, as there is just enough evidence from an earlier drill programme to suggest that there might be a copper porphyry structure there that’s completely independent of the main target at Guinaoang, on which hard updated resource numbers are due by the end of the first half of this year.
Geologically speaking this wouldn’t exactly be a shocking outcome, as there are already 16 known porphyry deposits in the area, and copper-gold production isn’t new to the area either. The famous Lepanto mine is only six kilometres east of the Mankayan licence. But it would be boon enough to Bezant, which is already sitting pretty on a 2008 JORC compliant inferred resource of 2.77 million tonnes at 0.5% copper and 0.42 grammes per tonne gold, which gives 3.1 billion pounds of copper and 3.8 million ounces of gold. For a smaller capitalized company, this is a big deposit.
The drilling that’s now ending was designed not so much to expand on those numbers, as to firm them up a bit by moving inferred resources into the indicated category. Snowden did the initial estimate, and Snowden will do the new one too, but much of the data that Bezant originally relied on was historic, dating back many, many years to times when Pacific Falkon, Goldfields Asia, and others held the ground. Now with 45,000 metres of its own drilling to work off, Bezant really can begin to pull this project out of the past and begin to look towards the future. At this stage the economics of how Guinaoang, or the wider Mankayan, will work are far from clear. But working them out is now not too far down Bernard’s list of things to do. In the case of Guinaoang, Snowden’s work goes slightly beyond simply updating the resource numbers, as the consultant will also report on recoveries, and give an independent indication of whether the project is block caveable or not.
It’s work that heads into the territory of a pre-feasibility study, though Bernard is clear that what he wants initially is an idea of what the economics look like, rather than anything specifically to take to market. “Part of what we’re doing”, he says, “is identifying a high-grade zone. Let’s call it a mineable block”. His intention is to move Bezant steadily along the road towards developing of a standalone operation, though that’s obviously a little way off yet. Whether or not that strategy turns out to be just to an prudent insurance policy, only time will tell, but one thing’s for sure: plenty of influential mining types have been showing an interest in what Bezant is up to, and not just the obvious near neighbours at Lepanto or their Chinese friends. “It’ll stand by itself”, says Bernard, before obliquely adding, “the fact that there are obvious synergies with our neighours is something that can be explored”.
There’s currently US$3 million in the bank, so there’s no real rush or pressure. Indeed, Bernard is at pains to point out that once the rigs stand down from this final bit of drilling in April, the company will have very few outgoings at all. Then, the thinking is, there’ll be a nice breathing space for Bezant, while the market digests the new numbers, and while, with any luck, the copper price starts to stage a recovery. Once the current crisis washes its way through the system copper may go on the march again, in which case potential valuations for Mankayan would soar. Broker research from Matrix is due out soon, once the broker has updated its overall future metals forecasts, and it will be interesting to see what sort of an NPV will be ascribed to Mankayan. You can bet it won’t be peanuts, but where the copper price sits will be key. Bernard will be back in town in about two months time – by then we’ll know quite a bit more. |
