Timok - the Lower zone - part II

Deep porphyries, what more could a geologist want. Several weeks ago I asked a simple question (link):

Will it be good or bad!!

We have some more results from Lower Timok (link) that put a few holes into this area.



They also drilled a few holes in the core of the deposit, and as they also announced that they'll have an initial resource estimate by mid-2018, i decided to have a go, and so here is one of my wonderfully pathetic resource guesstimates (TM). You can get the Updated LF views from here (link)

Quite big!

In the last post (link) I used a 400m base range, and commented that this may be to large for resource calculation, so I've been conservative and reduced it to 300m, which I'm more comfortable with using as it is a reasonable value to define inferred resource.

Remember - using a very big search ranges is a good way to inflate resources in all deposits. In porphyries - anything above 300m is starting to look unrealistic, and is a good thing to check. In exploration, I like to use twice the average drill-hole spacing as a first pass.

It is looking quite robust,  shame it is at ~800m depth, but the numbers are still good enough to support a large underground operation, especially as they'll be making oodles of cash from the upper deposit.

Exploration upside

I also want to see if it can get bigger, from just a giant deposit to a massive one. With the CAPEX required to develop a large underground mine, Nevsun will want something that will support a 20+ year mine life. Again, if you see a project with a <10 year mine life, unless it has exceptional grades, it is best to avoid. It may pay back the CAPEX, but you want something that will generate enough revenues to develop the next project.

Here we have good news and bad news. Looking at a few sections through it

Yellow = long section location cyan = cross section locations

Long Section

Damn, my great idea was crap. The could of holes drilled to look for the SE (left) continuation hit virtually nothing, and to the NW, the grades are decent, but we are getting very very deep (almost 2km).

SE Cross section

We can see that to the NE mineralization is closed off, but maybe below the Upper zone, we could see more mineralization. It is relatively shallow (~900m depth). I've doodled on what I think is the high temperature core, where normally there isn't much mineralization, but potentially it could mean that they only half of the system has been drilled. It would be nice to see some section showing Moly and vein-type distributions (*cough* *cough*).

NW Cross section

We're much deeper, but the mineralization is open to the NE and SW.

So there appears to be some obvious areas to expand the mineralization. however, I would like to see Nevsun start to use directional drilling or drilling wedge holes (similar to SolGold at Alpala).

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