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Precious metals: Finally silver is making an appearance – and a ‘bonanza’ one at that
Mining
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For a while now it has been a flood of gold news, but with the silver price finally making its move, the explorers are stepping up the silver news.
And there is no better way to go than by announcing what would definitely be classified as a “bonanza” grade hit.
Force Commodities (ASX:4CE) revealed today it had uncovered a grade of 2,411 grams per tonne (g/t) silver from a grab sample taken at its Tshimpala project in Malawi.
As a rule of thumb, anything over 50g/t is considered high-grade and while there is no official definition for a bonanza grade (just a way of describing speccy finds), it’s safe to say this would definitely make it into the bonanza category.
>>READ: Here’s a plain language guide on how miners ‘grade’ mineral discoveries
The news pushed shares up 6.3 per cent to 1.7c this morning.
That same sample also graded 57.25 per cent lead, which is definitely well above the 10g/t point considered high-grade.
Obviously grab sampling is an early exploration technique and it’s by no means a guarantee that Force will find the same high grades when it drills – but it’s a pretty good start!
“The silver values of over 2,400g/t returned from a grab sample, whilst preliminary in nature, clearly goes to further demonstrate the exceptionally high silver grades possible at the Tshimpala project,” managing director Jason Brewer said.
Force plans to start a 150-hole drilling program at the Tshimpala project later this month.
Historically, silver tends to track the gold price up and down, eventually. It’s moving now, reaching nearly $US20/oz today.
This improved outlook could see Investigator Resources (ASX:IVR) dust off an advanced South Australian silver project called Paris — the highest grade non-by-product silver project in Australia at 9.3 million tonnes grading 139g/t.
The explorer says Paris is “well placed” in the current market.
In other ASX precious metals news today:
Of course it wouldn’t be a normal day right now without a bevy of high-grade gold hits too.
Dateline Resources (ASX:DTR) has made a new high-grade gold discovery at its Gold Links project in Colorado, reporting grades of up to 200g/t from surface and up to 816g/t at depth from grab sampling. Meanwhile, drilling of the 2150 vein delivered high grades of up to 151g/t.
Frontier Resources’ (ASX:FNT) share price leapt over 23 per cent to a morning high of 1.6c after it announced grades of 1041.2g/t gold from trenching along the Taula vein.
A single hole drilled by Exore Resources (ASX:ERX) at its Veronique discovery in Cote d’Ivoire returned “high-grade free-milling” gold. It delivered 8m at 7.74g/t from 78m in fresh rock. Exore said it could get a 90 per cent gold extraction from unoptimised baseline cyanide leaching. Shares climbed 11.5 per cent to 8.7c.
African Gold’s (ASX:A1G) also got a bit of a share price boost today after it announced it was buying another gold project in Mali. Historical drill results from the new project include 6.6m at 115.5g/t. Shares advanced as much as 14.6 per cent to 23.5c.
