Diamond & Specialty Minerals Summary for June 20, 2022
2022-06-20 17:41 ET - Market Summary
by Will Purcell
The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score for Monday was a positive 97-81-132 as the TSX Venture Exchange rose one point to 641. Patrick Power's Arctic Star Exploration Corp. (ADD) added one-half cent to eight cents on 110,000 shares.
The company has wrapped up its spring drill program at Diagras, a multimillion-dollar effort that accomplished much but not all the company hoped to get done, as a result of bad weather -- bad in the sense that on one hand, the drillers were left sheltering from raging blizzards earlier in the year, and then because they had to bug out early as the ice melted from under their feet in unusually warm weather at the end of the season.
Mr. Power, president and chief executive officer, says that the Sequoia kimberlite received six of the planned nine drill holes. While the company still does not have a total weight for the 504 metres of kimberlite intersected, the mathematics suggests a dry weight of just over 3.8 tonnes for the latest Sequoia program. That will help flesh out the size distribution profile for the pipe, but not to the extent he and his crew likely hoped, as the original expectation was for "several" -- not "barely a few" -- tonnes of the diamond-bearing rock.
Along with the smaller number of completed holes, the delineation tests that Arctic Star did finish were underwhelming. The first three holes were drilled just south-southeast of the 2021 discovery hole, which had targeted the southwestern end of the main geophysical anomaly. That hole encountered kimberlite at 28 metres and remained in various phases of the rock to the 154-metre bottom of the hole.
This year's vertical hole did much the same. It left kimberlite at 156 metres and, save for a nine-metre encounter about 15 metres deeper, that was it. Worse, a hole from the same setup, angled eastward, did not hit any kimberlite, while the westward-angled hole managed just 27 metres of shallow-lying kimberlite. Mr. Power and Buddy Doyle, his long-time vice-president of exploration, explain the result as Arctic Star having drilled the southern edge of an eruption centre. The thinking is, they say, that Sequoia is a series of kimberlite pipes that coalesce into one target.
The drillers then moved their rig about 100 metres northward for a second series of three holes. The vertical hole delivered as expected, with a kimberlite hit at 18 metres, and the bit remained in the rock when the hole ended at 225 metres. Further, the eastward-angled hole produced nearly 70 metres of kimberlite, while the westward test managed 65 metres.
Mr. Power and Mr. Doyle had initially planned to drill from three sites at Sequoia, with the uncompleted setup proposed at a location still farther north. There was a seventh hole completed at Sequoia this spring, but that test was not directly a part of the delineation drill program since it tested a magnetic low about 1,700 metres away. Unfortunately, the drill failed to encounter kimberlite. Curiously, Mr. Doyle was chasing a "distinct magnetic low" at that location, a distinct departure from his theory that the best diamond targets in the Lac de Gras area have little or no magnetic signature.
Only half of the split core from Sequoia, about 1.9 tonnes, will be dissolved for microdiamond recovery. Last year's drilling at Sequoia produced 292.6 kilograms initially, although curiosity got the better of the company and so Mr. Doyle sent the other half of the core for processing a few months later. In all, about 505 kilograms of the rock produced 479 microdiamonds, about 950 stones per tonne, and just two of them were commercial-sized stones weighing perhaps 0.04 carat.
Divining grades from such small tests involves a blend of exploratory hope and geological theory and, depending on how energetically Mr. Doyle chokes his promotional carburetor, Arctic Star touts a possible diamond content rising from less than 10 carats per hundred tonnes to something significantly higher than the 30-carat-per-hundred-tonne value that proved economic under the right circumstances at the nearby Fox and Leslie pipes at Ekati.
Mr. Power and Mr. Doyle did score a new discovery this year, with two quick holes drilled into the Arbutus target, described as a "distinct magnetic low" southeast of Finlay, an old De Beers Canada discovery on the property. That will be a tougher sell, of course, the company having pooh-poohed such targets of late, and the fact that each of the holes encountered just 20 metres of kimberlite apiece. Still, one never looks a gift horse in the mouth, and so Arctic Star is sending 140 kilograms of rock for diamond recovery. |
