In this extensive interview, Mr. Bruce Ballantyne, Project Manager for Jaxon Mining (TSXV:JAX), provides a compelling overview of the excitement surrounding exploration for auriferous tourmaline breccia pipes around the world. It was my great pleasure to capture this recording just before the company launched their 2018 field season with first-pass field program June 1st, 2018. Watch for news as the company makes the most of the 2018 season.
Bruce Ballantyne: The Hazelton property is now approximately 47,000 hectares of land. We expanded it last spring with a prospecting group based in Smithers, which is a local family that is running an entrepreneurial operation. They had a claim that we optioned and focused all of our exploration efforts on, which was called the Max showing. We focused on the Max showing last year and it is a volcanogenic massive sulfide target with very high grade silver sulfosalts and zinc mineralization at surface.
Peter Bell: How much relief is there? It looks steep from these pictures.
Bruce Ballantyne: Yes, it sure does have some good relief. Listen. There is a river valley called the Herald Price Creek and it is approximately 700 meters upwards from there to the top of where we were drilling.
There are logging roads going up along the hillside up from the Herald Price Creek and there is a large amount of massive sulfide material in the woods exposed all across that slope. However, it is very wooded there and this VMS exposure is in the trees, which is very interesting.
Previous companies had spent a lot of money here doing soils, streams, and other types of surface work programs up to approximately 2012. Then, they went bust. They never drilled. It’s an old mineral occurrence going back to the 1900s when people came through here on their way to discover silver up in Hazelton. There was a rush in the mid-1980s, but that dropped off quickly. When the area was resurrected more recently, we realized that this looked like Eskay Creek with a shallow marine ocean floor style setting and a particular kind of volcanogenic massive sulfides that are rich in precious metals! That's what made Eskay Creek so attractive previously – that it had a high precious metal content along with the base metal content.
In this case, the grades were quite high in silver at surface and we also have gold. This is in a different age of ocean, but that age of ocean here has been recognized by the BC Department of Mines as being good setting for those kinds of deposits. Of course, we have two different kinds of occurrences there, the Knoll and the Max, and they're associated with extrusive volcanic activity and all that kind of stuff.
All that made for one good target, but we acquired that first. As I began to look around the rest of the district, I was searching for any other mineral occurrences that we could stake 100% ourselves.
Peter Bell: Nice.
Bruce Ballantyne: What is the rest of the mineral potential on a district scale at Hazelton beyond our original starting point at the Max and Knoll occurrences? Sure enough, there was a stream sediment geochemical survey done in 1983! If you look at Map Sheet 93 M on the 250-thousand scale sheet, then there were about 800 for the whole area. There were numerous regional stream sediment sample sites also located in this area around the Max and Knoll occurrences. Some of them were very high in silver, arsenic, zinc, and gold, but the key thing was antimony because antimony, the element Sb, is associated with silver-bearing sulfosalts at low temperature, just like Eskay Creek. This is early stuff, but it had us excited as it is an outstanding signature for silver mineralization, as it is associated with a maximum of over one kilogram silver per tonne as silver sulfosalts.
Antimony was a very strong precious metal indicator for mineralization in this region. As a consequence to having all kinds of other really good anomalous free information around in this area, we staked the whole rest of the thing ourselves.
Peter Bell: Wow.
Bruce Ballantyne: It was open ground.
Peter Bell: Good for you.
Bruce Ballantyne: There were no other mineral occurrences, per se. There's a couple little mineral occurrences here and they were found because in 1984 after people followed-up on the regional stream sediment sample results from 1983. One of the groups working in the area was Noranda and Atna Mining, who ultimately found six different silver occurrences in this region away from the Max and Knoll. There were extreme sediment geochemistry results in the area.
Bruce Ballantyne: As we were flying back and forth to work at the Max and Knoll in 2017, we noticed all kinds of red rusty rocks also in the region. We were flying over them every time we went out to the field and it just breaks a geologist’s heart to see something like that without being able to walk around on it. We were chomping at the bit – can we get down there and look around at these rocks? These were just some interesting rocks in the region that we were seeing at this time, but all our effort was focused on the Max. We were following up on old anomalies from the old days, which had some occurrences with kilograms of silver per tonne.
Peter Bell: Are there forest roads nearby?
Bruce Ballantyne: Yes, there are little slash roads heading up the hillside. There is good access all around here, but we still use helicopters to get in and get out. It’s good that we did as we kept flying over those kinds of things and finally took our prospecting crews to land at what we called the Red Spring.
Bruce Ballantyne: The pictures of the Red Spring tell a story for those who know about mining in British Columbia. There were similarities to the Red Chris, the Mitchel Sulfurets, Sulphurous Lake, Kemess, or the Treaty Glacier – all those deposits looks like this at surface with lots of red rocks and we kept seeing that kind of thing when we were flying over it. Just highly anomalous and highly attractive, as in this picture here.
Peter Bell: Amazing.
Bruce Ballantyne: All that red rock generally means sulfides are oxidizing at surface. Why had nobody gone down there to do any work? Maybe they prospected everything but didn't find anything interesting. You never know what’s there till you look, so we sent our prospectors out – a team of two professional British Columbia prospectors who work for a lot of different companies. They worked for us last summer and collected some samples in this area. When we got the assays back, we provided our first press release on what was called the CRT-RS Area.
Bruce Ballantyne: What does CRT-RS mean? Well, it is the Cirque Ridge Tarn and Red Spring. They sampled down there and got a whole bunch of results. I can't remember what the press release said, but the majority of samples were anomalous in gold with 500 ppb or greater. Ten of the samples, if I recall correctly, had greater than 10 parts per million gold, if you can imagine. That was very encouraging as it was the very first time anybody hit these rocks with a hammer.
The prospectors brought the rocks in and I saw them that night. They looked highly attractive. We kidded each other as to what the grade was going to be. The prospector said it was going to be over an ounce, but I wouldn’t stick my neck out that far. I just said that I thought they would run.
When the results came back for samples from their initial prospecting efforts, the highest samples had about 17.3 grams per tonne gold. Quite a few had greater than 10 grams per tonne. Keep in mind that these samples were taken from several different places as part of a first-pass program.
Peter Bell: Good.
Bruce Ballantyne: These were good results, in my opinion. Then, we went on to the drilling season for the Max in November. As we were flying to the Max, we were even more excited when we looked down at the CRT as we saw the same red rocks as before and now we knew that there were all kinds of samples with +10 grams of gold down there!
You can see on this map where the prospectors found all these samples with greater than +10 grams per tonne in this first pass at CRT-RS.
Bruce Ballantyne: Then I got the opportunity a couple times to stop down in here. I wanted to come to this cirque to re-sample and look at what these areas up close.
Peter Bell: Of course.
Bruce Ballantyne: We have a map of the CRT area and there are some good field stories here. We were planning to fly in to the CRT in one particular area, but due to weather we couldn’t land where we wanted. This was October-November, the end of the field season here. We hadn’t been up to the CRT area but really wanted to get there and we kept having difficulties getting in with the weather. It was good that we kept at it because when we did get in there we found one of the samples with 17 grams gold in the South Cirque.
We came back another day and couldn't get into that same spot because the weather had changed, so we landed at what we call the North Cirque and that's where we found our highest grade sample overall! In fact, that was the first time in my entire career of 43 years or so in the bush that I was able to bang off rocks that had never been touched before by anybody and get samples running over an ounce per tonne gold.
Peter Bell: Really? That’s pretty special. Over an ounce per tonne?
Bruce Ballantyne: Yes, there was one sample that came back at 33.8 grams per tonne gold.
Peter Bell: Any visible gold?
Bruce Ballantyne: No visible gold.
Peter Bell: Okay. That may not be surprising with all the red oxidized rocks you’ve been seeing around.
Bruce Ballantyne: There were several other sample around there that ran 10 grams. In the end, the weather forced us to start doing a more regional around the area where the two prospectors originally found the gold at CRTS back in the late summer. We were able to re-sample the area they covered, but we were also forced to look at some other areas and that’s where we found even better samples. It was very encouraging to find the same sorts of things happening in different areas.
The bottom line is that this is a tourmaline breccia system with all kinds of other well-developed things around it. The tourmaline breccias are coming to surface and have quartz and sulfides associated with it, which is encouraging, but really important information is that there is a lot of gold here. And the rocks are rich in Te, Tellurium, which is the best element of all the precious element pathfinders.
Tellurium is basically a metal that likes to form a complex with precious metals. You've got all sorts of silver tellurides and gold tellurides – all sorts of good stuff. It's neat because tellurium can exist in hydrothermal systems over a wide range of temperatures and precipitate out with precious metals over a wide range of temperatures. So you could find the tourmaline-rich ore samples right at surface in bulging out hot springs or warm springs today, which are very young things, or deep in the ground in typical Californian gold deposits like the Mother Lode District, or even in Archean rocks like the gold deposits in Noranda or Red Lake. Tellurium can be found all over the place, but when you find it with gold, the deposits are typically rich in gold. That was an exciting aspect of all of this.
The second thing is that seeing tellurium and tourmaline together is a rather new and interesting aspect that hasn't really been dealt with by any economic geologist in the discussion of porphyry coppers and porphyry copper-gold systems.
The key to all this is that boron is a gas and tourmaline is a boron-aluminum silicate, which wants to move higher in the system. Tellurium itself can become gaseous and vaporize, which is an indicator that there was extrusive volcanism – explosions.
Bruce Ballantyne: These tourmaline breccias are spectacular and are being explored actively right now in Peru and other parts in the world, which we'll get to. I like to refer to these things as intercontinental ballistic missiles because the tourmaline breccias explode as fingers up off of these intrusions that are the parents underneath.
And it’s not necessarily just one event with these missiles shooting up from below. With all that stress happening, you get brecciation because of the way the gas vapors move up through the rocks. They push out and break things up, but then the rocks collapse back in on themselves. If the conditions are right, then you can get a well-mineralized tourmaline breccia. It requires the right mix of tourmaline vapour gas, water for hydrothermal alteration, sulfides, and all the other good stuff happening to cause a violent extrusive event. When the volcano explodes, you get a decompression event and that change in pressure is very important. Prior to the explosion, the confining pressure is essential for causing the nice crystallization in the granitic intrusion. Then, it just finally decides to crack and let go.
They're exciting rocks to find, to look at, and to read. There are many people around the world who are reading them right now and putting them together in a nice geological story. Of course, we do not have gold-copper-tellurium bearing breccias pipes in British Columbia, the Yukon, or elsewhere in Canada or the United States.
These things are known in Peru and are known in Chile. Some of the biggest copper producing mines in Chile are historic 100-year old tourmaline breccia pipes.
Peter Bell: Wow.
Bruce Ballantyne: They have big numbers for tonnage and grade. They are some of the most fantastic stories in the world right now as far as mineral exploration.
Many people have heard about the mammoth copper porphyry system that Robert Friedland and his group eventually found at Oyu Tolgoi in Mongolia. A lot of Canadians and Aussies were involved in it over the years. It is a huge porphyry system in Mongolia that they have been able to develop to such a degree that it's the first porphyry system so rich in gold in one part of the system that they could actually go underground with shafts and mine it underground with block-caving of great big areas.
It wasn't an open-pit copper mine like you might expect. I think they have one of those going alongside it, but the most exciting stuff is what is underneath. There were billions of dollars of required to develop that giant system and put it into production. It is now being mined by Rio Tinto, but there is another company just 60 miles away in the Gobi desert that is doing some great exploration work on one of these tourmaline breccias. It is a junior exploration company out of Australia called Xanadu and it is run by a group of Australians who were involved in Friedland’s Gobi find. In fact, the principals working on the Soledad Project in Peru for Chakana copper, which is another tourmaline breccia, were involved Oyu Tolgoi as well.
I find it all extremely interesting. I tell my folks here that if you were a successful economic geologist working on the world's largest, at that time, undeveloped copper-gold deposit in the world and you eventually got the boot because somebody else took the project over, which is what happened with Rio, then you would have to go think about what kind of deposit you would like to go search for yourself. If, of course, you still wanted to work in the industry.
What would it be?
Peter Bell: Surely, it would be another one of those.
Bruce Ballantyne: Tourmaline breccias with tellurium and gold, leading to high-grade copper. That's just what they did and that is the genesis of the two most successful groups attacking that style of mineral deposit at this present time in the entire world.
Now then, out of the blue, poor old Jaxon starts doing some exploration work in BC on some red-stained rocks with obvious mineralization and what do we find sticking out of the ground? Tourmaline breccias, which are basically unheard of in British Columbia. I've gone and asked all of the important people that map all of these things, whether they are from the federal government Geological Survey, the BC Department of Mines, or other people in the exploration industry – all kinds of people who are extremely successful in British Columbia finding porphyry coppers and different things – and nobody has heard of any tourmaline breccias with gold and copper in British Columbia.
Our job is now to take the Red Spring area and examine it closely, just like the people at Chakana and Xanadu did. Where do these tourmaline breccia pipes come up and so on. That may sound easy enough, but there are a few different ways you could do that. I believe geophysics is the best way to start here. One reason for that is that we are above the tree line, so we see everything. There's not a lichen on these rocks.
Why would we want to do geophysics? Well, these pipes or ballistic missiles probably do not all come to the surface. Some of them might get only partway up to surface. We want to know what might be down there.
Bruce Ballantyne: The geophysics from exploration in the Gobi desert shows that these instrusives don’t all come to surface. Since they are dioritic intrusives, they have some magnetite left and have a magnetic signal. However, the places where they interpret that a breccia body is present has no magnetite at all because it's all boron. It's smashed to heck with everything else, so it's a magnetic low.
If you had a magnetic low sitting over top of a magnetic high, then that's one of the ways you could look for these things. If we look quickly, at this airborne magnetic map from the BC Department of Mines and the area of our high-level tourmaline breccias, then we will see some little magnetic highs, which we interpret as being little dioritic stocks. We probably also have other, more differentiated intrusions with less magnetite associated with the monzonites, granites, and all that type of stuff, but this is it.
Peter Bell: Any ability to see these features at surface?
Bruce Ballantyne: Well that's a good question. We're gonna get boots on the ground and see exactly that.
Peter Bell: Is this government data from a regional program?
Bruce Ballantyne: Yes, it was regional airborne stuff from the provincial government.
Peter Bell: Pretty wide spacing, too?
Bruce Ballantyne: Wide spacing and high. We're going to do ground magnetics on the lines we’ve laid out here.
Here are a couple pictures from Chakana Copper. They’ve shown that the resistivity is very helpful for giving cross sections along these intercontinental ballistic missiles. And this map showing the lay of the land at their project is important, too, as it shows several pipes sticking up the side of the hillside. That hillside is otherwise barren – it’s a barren landscape, but these black tourmaline breccia pipes come right up to surface. They’ve weathered away a bit, so there may be some gold and copper in soils as we’ve been seeing at CRT-RS.
The idea with all this is that you get a multi-phase system including the diorite, monzonite, and granitic porphyry system at depth with these “intercontinental ballistic missiles” or tourmaline breccias that are coming up through the rest of the rocks. All that produces a district, which can have other things going like epithermal systems, but the key target are these little black geysers.
You can see where Chakana ran their geophysical lines on this map. They went across their target area and produced cross sections like this. Sure enough, they saw a beautiful pipe-like feature coming to surface marking one of their breccias. They found other hidden ones that are near surface, but they can't see at surface. And that’s why I call these things systems: you might only see one finger, but they are systems. That's an important aspect of the exploration approach and deposit model.
Consider how important it is to really get this deposit model correct. There are two properties in the world today that are actively being explored for these types of deposits. In contrast, there are very many companies looking for porphyry coppers. At Chakana’s project, previous people had drilled down to depth looking for a porphyry but hadn’t drilled the breccias. They were looking for a porphyry at depth and doing all kinds of things, but now they know that some of these pipes have mineralization down all the way to 824 meters! They were misguided and they did the same thing in Mongolia. It might have been even worse there as they spent over $20 million doing near-surface drilling in Mongolia before they realized that they have to focus on the tourmaline pipes. It really wasn’t until this newest drilling by Xanadu that they started to understand this deposit model applies here.
Bruce Ballantyne: We benefit from all of this by learning from their successes and failures. We might find a nice district at CRT-RS with a swarm of these pipes. We’ve seen gold at surface associated with these tourmaline breccias, but there is lots of other stuff too. We are seeing common porphyry alteration outside of these breccia targets with sericitic alteration and chlorite, magnetite, epidote. It all makes for a nice, standard map of different zones of mineralization regionally at CRT-RS. We're creating maps to and figure out where to send the field crew this year.
Another thing that Xanadu and Chakana learned about drilling these things is that you can set up the drill up almost at the center of the pipe and drill down around the margins of the pipe to hit it at greater depths. The fluids and everything have come along the edge of the tourmaline pipe, which is where the vast majority of the mineralized material is coming up. At the edges of the tourmaline pipes, you actually get breccia or fragments of rock that have been cemented by mineralized material. Sometimes you see chalcopyrite as the cement for your chunks of tourmaline breccia, which yields assays at multiple percent copper and multiple grams of gold over great thicknesses and with great consistency.
Peter Bell: And to interrupt for a second. These numbers ...
Bruce Ballantyne: They staggering, aren't they?
Peter Bell: Yes. When they talk about intercepts going for hundreds of meters with multiple percentage points of copper, what is that?
Bruce Ballantyne: They would have drilled right down the side of the tourmaline breccia. Drilling right down the side of the deposit is risky and you should start by drilling across it in this way or that so you can get data from both sides. Regardless, it’s rich. Chakana does a really good job of showing just how these breccias are cemented by the copper minerals.
We hope to be able to find something like that. This one from Anglo-American is a famous one because of the size and grades. El Teniente is another one, too. These things were mined. Why did they mine these? They mined it for the 3.5% copper or 7% copper or whatever it was. They're not mining it for gold because the ones in Chile didn't have any gold.
The neat thing is that the Peruvian ones owned by Chakana do have gold, as do the Mongolian ones owned by Xanadu.
Peter Bell: Right. I can understand how a pair of new gold-rich tourmaline breccia pipes would be a breakthrough for the geological community. You mentioned tellurium and I gather that can make recovery of the gold tricky. Any comments on that?
Bruce Ballantyne: Yes, it was a problem for the old-timers because tellurium has a great affinity for gold. If you were using the fire assay technique with material that had high tellurium content, then you had to be careful that you were working at the right temperatures. The gold has a propensity to stay behind and be amalgamed with your tellurium, which causes it to end up in the glass stent rather than the lead bead. That’s a huge problem that depends on what your temperature was in the fire assay. If you get the temperature up, then you can cause the tellurium to become a gas, get driven out of the samples, and just go up the spout as exhaust. In that case, the tellurium isn’t a problem and you can tell the lab if you expect that to be a problem. They can overcome these problems with tellurium if they use a different flux for the fire assay and prolonged time at greater temperatures, for example.
But here's another aside to all of that.
A few years ago, an Americans person was working on a think tank for mining. They were focused on actually building something that worked and they came up with a company called First Solar. First Solar started as a couple guys in a garage, but it became a success story like Hewlett-Packard. The growth of First Solar was driven by a product they came up with, which is a thin film made of tellurium that you can put on solar panels to make them far more efficient in collecting energy. They thought it up and made it happen, but they encountered a problem. You can guess what it is, Peter. There’s little-no tellurium around for them to buy!
Peter Bell: Really?
Bruce Ballantyne: No, most of the refineries just blast it up the pipe and goes out as gas in exhaust. There is no tellurium metal available as a single element, whether as deposits or existing mines. As you said, the tellurium was a problem for the old timers and the gold mining industry has given limited attention to the significance of tellurium.
First Solar had to convince specialized gold refiners around the world to put scrubbers to capture the tellurium in their systems! There are actually 2 refineries that are notoriously famous in Europe for doing that. The fact that First Solar could source tellurium there was a big part of the reason why they have made plans to build many of their big plants for tellurium-enhanced solar panels in Europe first. They plan to build others in the Philippines later, too.
First Solar became highly successful, but that is a new modern application for tellurium and how it relates to gold. I thought you'd find interesting because their source of tellurium for their new clean energy ended up being the gold mining industry.
Peter Bell: Always good to see a mining company can generate revenue from something that was formerly a waste product!
Bruce Ballantyne: Yes, indeed.
Bruce Ballantyne: There is another interesting example where Chakana went to a copper porphyry tourmaline breccia pipe in South Korea where they had a lot of data, with a detailed understanding of how things change at different levels of the pipe. The highest amounts of copper concentrations are always on the margins, as you end up having lower permeability in the center portions of the pipe and greater permeability at the edges because of the way the breccia fragments are oriented around the edges.
Just look at this picture of a core sample from the edges. See how things are stacking up like that? That's a good diagnostic for where you are in the breccia system. You could look at those results and can see the way these minerals came in here.
They actually refer to these features from the margins as "shingle textures". The outside because as you're coming up the margins you see that your fragments of country rock that are being brecciated and cemented together are like shingles on a roof. Chakana and others know that these things keep going down a long ways. I believe they are talking about 2 kilometers of vertical extent to these pipes based on their geophysics. And they have a cluster of these pipes that looks like a district in itself. They have pipes poking up at all kinds of different elevations over a kilometer at surface. They are able to drill the pipes and find the different textures of their tourmaline breccia that are well known and important diagnostics for determining where in the pipe you are based on the textures of the breccia.
These tourmaline breccia pipes or ballistic missiles are similar to kimberlite pipes around the world, which we know how to mine them for diamonds. We know how to design the underground workings in a way that goes down around the pipe in a circle. You could do that with some of these ballistic missiles. There was a famous one in Finland that went with that mining method, which is extremely efficient. The spiral allowed them to dig out only the high-grade material at the edge of the tourmaline breccia and leave the core of the pipe behind. They did that and it worked. The mine made a lot of money.
Chakana has a great blessing with their deposit in that the pipes are exposed on the top of a hill, but they could build an adit at the bottom of the hill nearby and come up from below! I thought that was just brilliant when I first heard about that because it could greatly simplify their logistics just by having their main adit at the bottom of a valley rather than a top of a hill. Of course, there’s a mine nearby the bottom of the hill too. It’s not a steep mountain valley like you might expect in BC, as things are different where they are in Peru.
Bruce Ballantyne: They’ve done some really exciting calculations here that tell the story about why we’re all excited about these ballistic missiles, too. If you had a breccia pipe with a diameter of six-hundred meters, then you can calculate the tonnage of ore you would get if you mined to different depths and you can compare that with the size of a single vein with similar grades required to get the same tonnage.
Peter Bell: That sounds like an interesting way to compare these pipes and deposits that people might be more familiar with. I wonder if they’re assuming that they would be mining out the entire pipe, or just taking out the higher grade stuff at the edges at you just mentioned.
Bruce Ballantyne: I don’t know, but I suspect that they are taking most of the pipe, not just the edges.
If you took a slice across the twenty-fifth meter and mined up to the top of the pipe, then you’d get some amount of material. If you went down to the fifty-meter level, the seventy-five-meter level, and so on, then you’d get different amounts each time. Assuming the same specific gravity, copper grades and all that throughout, you can calculate the size of a single vein required to get the same amount of tonnage. Even just going down a breccia pipe one-hundred meters, you'd have to have a vein that was a meter and a half wide by two hundred and fifty meters deep by twelve kilometers long! That gives you an idea of why these breccia pipes are so important.
Isn't that amazing? Mining a breccia pipe with 600-meter diameter down one-hundred meters would produce the same amount of gold and copper as a vein 1.5 meters wide, 250 meters deep, and 12 kilometers long! That gives you an idea of why these breccia pipes are so important. I thought that was a brilliant calculation that Chakana has in their presentation.
Peter Bell: Yes, that is a stunning calculation. It speaks to the importance of having another dimension to the deposit. A vein is like a line, whereas a pipe is like a solid. The potential to get so much more mineralized material in a volume reminds me of the space-filling solids from fractal geometry and all that. Wow.
Bruce Ballantyne: It is very interesting for sure, Peter. You could mine something at typical widths of 1.5 meters down two hundred fifty meters and over twelve kilometers along strike, or you could mine this down in a spiral down one hundred meters and get the same amount of ore.
Peter Bell: That's amazing.
Bruce Ballantyne: It's not bad to have ballistic missiles. All of that is an important concept that Chakana did a great job describing in their presentation.
Bruce Ballantyne: There’s more good stuff in the Chakana Copper presentation, too. I want you to see some of the textures there, which are very distinctive.
Peter Bell: Yes, I saw this one with the chalcopyrite. Amazing.
Bruce Ballantyne: Stunning. We don’t have anything like that yet. We’re still in the oxidized part of the system at surface, right. We are seeing 0.8-0.3% copper left behind, which is nothing to shake a stick at.
Peter Bell: And that’s because the copper grade typically decreases a bunch when the oxidation happens, right? I look forward to when you can find that enrichment blanket, too!
Bruce Ballantyne: That's right.
Now, we will get to the pictures of the rocks but let’s look at this diagram from a famous paper by Sillitoe, who is referred to as "Mister Porphyry" for all his work on the topic. This diagram is from a paper by Sillitoe and Sawkins in 1971, where they looked at a tourmaline breccia. Notice that the title mentions “Studies Relating to the Origin of Copper-bearing Tourmaline Breccia Pipes in Chile”, but they don’t mention the word gold.
At the time they created this model and ever since then, Sillitoe has never dealt with the fact that there are these exotic tourmaline breccia pipes with copper and precious metals out there in the world.
Peter Bell: I wonder if they had tellurides in that one in Chile.
Bruce Ballantyne: It had world-class grades, world-class tonnes, and all that, but it didn't have the precious metals. We don't know, as geologists, what makes a copper-rich tourmaline breccia also contain gold. They're fairly new to us and we don't know yet.
This diagram from Sillitoe and Sawkins shows your pipe-like structure and how the rock textures change. What we see exposed at surface at CRT-RS could be towards the top of the pipe or we could be down a ways. We should start to get a sense for that when we do geophysics at site.
Regardless, we have something of a road map based on the textural differences of the breccia. The look of the rocks are diagnostic as to where you are within the tourmaline breccia system. You can see some of the differences in the way things look in this drawing from 1971.
Peter Bell: Yes, look at that.
Bruce Ballantyne: You've got chaotic ones, others with more normal brecciation, and others still with fragments lining up in parallel. See how the fragments are in roughly in parallel in the area they’ve marked as “Oriented slab-like fragments”, but bending downwards? That’s an area where they rocks fell in and collapsed as the thing decompressed.
Peter Bell: Right, the release of gasses with all this extrusive volcanism. Intercontinental ballistic missiles, indeed!
Bruce Ballantyne: Imagine hundreds and hundreds of meters along the edge of normal breccia cemented by quarts and sulfides, namely chalcopyrite, which causes the rock to run at 3-5% copper and stuff like that.
And look at the bottom of this drawing – do you see that question mark? When they were working on this in 1971, they hadn’t even seen the bottom! They still don't know to this day, but it shows you that the textures of the rock are very diagnostic – there is good potential to read the rocks. That's another thing that I think is important.
Bruce Ballantyne: Let’s move on to the pictures that Chakana have in their presentation. Just beautiful drill core. They presented the core at Roundup and Prospectors and Developers Convention this year and they were the hottest thing going.
They have a picture of core from Los Sulfatos owned by Anglo American, which is just a normal copper one. It is world-class. The copper grades in that hole from Los Sulfatos are around 3.5%, which is similar to what Chakana has at Soledad except that Chakana also has 13-odd grams of gold!
Would you rather have 3.5% copper in a normal copper tourmaline breccia or 3.5% copper with half an ounce of gold?
Peter Bell: Yes, of course, but I'm not looking at that – I'm looking at the length of that hole. PALSUL13 with 730 meters at 3.58% copper from 66 meters depth?!
Bruce Ballantyne: It’s amazing, isn’t it?
Peter Bell: And looking at the core from Chakana, I can see some of these shingles you mentioned and then some bigger chunks.
Bruce Ballantyne: Yes, they're showing different things. The that Chakana found gold was in pyrite and chalcopyrite, which is fine because you can do a sulfide con to get the gold.
Peter Bell: No problems with tellurium?
Bruce Ballantyne: There is tellurium in these deposits.
Peter Bell: But the gold wasn't on it?
Bruce Ballantyne: No. I asked the Chakana team some of this stuff myself. I met with Doug Kirwin and his partner to ask him all kinds of questions. They're really open and understand all this stuff very well. They told that me they have tellurium. I asked Jerry Blackwell about it, too. He is the QP who wrote the qualifying report for this property and went through all of the data. Some of the data for their copper and gold had assay numbers for tellurium, but others didn't so they didn't include it in the report. They didn’t want to start redoing assays for tellurium or anything like that.
Peter Bell: Yes, I understand that.
Bruce Ballantyne: But I can tell you that it's there, which is not particularly surprising.
Peter Bell: And just to clarify, this picture is showing a tourmaline breccia?
Bruce Ballantyne: Yes. Particularly in areas where the cement has a higher amount of sulphides, which contain the economic metals. I believe these pieces of core are taken from the edges of the breccia pipes.
Peter Bell: Having the sulphides as cement makes for some gorgeous rock.
Bruce Ballantyne: For Chakana to be drilling this stuff as a grassroots exploration program, is pretty exciting.
Bruce Ballantyne: The other thing I wanted you to notice is that the Soledad system has a high-sulphidation epithermal area, HSE, that others drilled before Chakana started working on these pipes. All these kinds of things in the system are interesting to geologists. Chakana also ran into a new Northeast gold zone with little veins nearby the HSE area. They're starting to figure out what this area is all about.
Peter Bell: Hearing about the HSE makes me think of the Red Spring at your property. Just the name tells a story of red rocks and hot springs. I wonder if Chakana will be able to establish some sort of deposit model that you can import to CRT-RS. The race is on!
Bruce Ballantyne: We will see.
Peter Bell: Did they do any geophysics with these tourmaline pipes on Chakana?
Bruce Ballantyne: Yes. Sorry, that's important because I thought I made that one clear.
Peter Bell: You did, but I just wanted to ask briefly again.
Bruce Ballantyne: They've done a bunch of things, including magnetics and IP. They’ve done resistivity, too, and that’s one they use in their presentations. Less resistivity means the current's going through the ground well, which can be happening for 2 different reasons but in this it’s because of the high sulfide content.
Peter Bell: And they're using an audio-magnetic method.
Bruce Ballantyne: Yes, you can magnetic frequency resistivity. It's just a different method, that's all. People use it often. It doesn't make any difference. It's a resistivity technique.
If you do a straight IP, then you may be limited in terms of the depth that you can reach. That's the key thing. This technique can model kilometers down. But, it's still just a model. The main point is that they can do their things to depth a little better.
Peter Bell: What they're getting is beautiful.
Bruce Ballantyne: Their resistivity is showing a ballistic missile that’s over a kilometer deep. They shouldn’t be afraid to drill deep.
Peter Bell: And the other map shows the ground lines that they did?
Bruce Ballantyne: Yes, those are the ground lines. You can see A-A’ marked on the map here. Resistivity works like a charm, as it should with those kinds of copper numbers.
We plan to do normal IP first at CRT-RS, not deep-penetrating geophysics.
Peter Bell: Because you found it on the surface?
Bruce Ballantyne: Chakana had them at surface as well.
The difference for us is more about elevation. The glaciation at CRT-RS means that we may be seeing things at surface that were at much different elevations to begin with. The local conditions like that are always important for any deposit.
Let's come to our friends over here in Gobi Desert.
Peter Bell: Xanadu!
Bruce Ballantyne: They have some more examples of the textures of these tourmaline breccia systems. Mongolia is tough because it’s flatter than a pancake and there’s basically no exposure. It’s all about drilling and Xanadu has spent something like $12 million on reverse circulation drilling in the Gobi desert.
Peter Bell: And I’ll just that it’s typical for Aussies to use RC drilling, even though everyone in Canada seems to think core drilling is the only way to go. Just in passing.
Bruce Ballantyne: They also did a lot of geophysics, deep-penetrating geophysics to give an idea of what the bedrock looks like. They have a photo of the area they’re working and there’s nothing but a drill rig, but there's billion of tonnes of ore underground there.
Bruce Ballantyne: This company is winning the race in the Australian market for the last 2 years, but they are just getting started on the tourmaline breccia pipes. Up until 2016, they were still shallowly drilling, looking for outcropping porphyry. It wasn’t until they started drilling deeper that they got clued into the tourmaline breccias and started to have this great success.
You can see this diagram of the large composite diorite intrusive complex extending over approximately 2 kilometers. These are the three ore bodies that go towards the overall resource they have now and they’ve started to see tourmaline breccias at depth but look at this other map – several of these little areas they’ve marked probably contain mineralized tourmaline breccias. Question is, how deep are they?
Peter Bell: Yes. I’m thinking it’s got to be deep with the lack of outcrop in the desert and all.
Bruce Ballantyne: Yes, but look closer at this diagram of the resource base. What you really want to see is purple blocks, which are high-grade copper material. They’ve marked one block of purple as “high-grade core tourmaline breccia” at depth, but look at the purple near surface.
They get classic porphyry type of mineralization with nice mineralization around 0.5% copper and have designed an open pit, but there are tourmaline breccias occurring within Altan Tolgoi. The classic association of tourmaline breccias with mineralization and chalcopyrite veins that gets me so excited.
Bruce Ballantyne: Look at this slide they have showing some of this breccia that is cemented with chalcopyrite. Just look at the one with 6 grams of gold and 5% copper over 2 meters – do you recognize the textures of that rock? It looks like the stuff from Chakana and elsewhere because the chalcopyrite has come in to fill the gaps caused by the brecciation and give these terrific grades.
It’s just fantastic to see them planning an open pit here. I hope they can figure out these breccia pipes. Whether they chose to focus on them or not, you can see how big the scale of these systems.
Peter Bell: They have a photo showing the tourmaline breccia and epithermal gold mineralization a few hundred meters apart, which reminds me of Chakana’s HSE area. I’m starting to see some of the pieces on the board here, Bruce. Whether I can put them together in the right way is something else, but thank you for walking me through all this stuff so far. Let’s keep going.
Bruce Ballantyne: There’s lots to talk about, but I will mention again that searching for numerous porphyry copper deposits under cover takes a lot of drilling. Just look at this cross section from Oyu Tolgoi they have in their presentation and how many holes were drilled.
Bruce Ballantyne: Now, all that drilling was worthwhile because Oyu Tolgoi is significant for the mining industry, globally, but it took a while to figure out the architecture as they say. They started looking for stuff close to surface, but then they realized they could go deeper and get more gold.
Peter Bell: It raises some interesting questions about the exploration approach for these tourmaline breccia pipes. If you're searching for porphyry and you start seeing tourmaline breccia, then that’s a good thing.
Bruce Ballantyne: If they’re mineralized then I’d be very happy. I'd be inclined to drill deeper.
Peter Bell: But I can understand if you missed them because they are shaped like missiles, right? A porphyry typically presents a big broadside target, but these could be hard to find if they don’t outcrop. They’re more discrete.
Bruce Ballantyne: Yes, but the fact that they are shaped like missiles means that you can certainly drill them deeply with some confidence.
Peter Bell: But only after you know they’re there.
Bruce Ballantyne: You’re right, Peter.
Peter Bell: Wonderful, thank you Bruce. Let’s take a break and come back to it. Always more to discuss!
Disclaimers
This document contains statements that are forward looking statements and are subject to various risks and uncertainties concerning the specific factors disclosed under the heading “Risk Factors” and elsewhere in the Company’s periodic filings with Canadian securities regulators. Such information contained herein represents management’s best judgment as of the date hereof based on information currently available. The Company does not assume the obligation to update any forward-looking statement.
Peter Bell has not been compensated to prepare and distribute this material.
