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Base Metals
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General Market Commentary
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General Base Metals
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General Market Commentary
Drilling For Copper At A Breakneck Pace
Publisher's Note: Today we have the second part of Gerardo Del Real's interview with CEO, President, and Director of Chakana Copper, Mr. David Kelley.
Yesterday, we heard about the Soledad project in Peru, its unique breccia pipe structure, and how Chakana's management team is uniquely qualified to explore it. If you missed it, you can read it here.
Read on to learn about what it all means for the Soledad project and Chakana Copper going forward.
To your wealth,
Nick Hodge
Publisher, Outsider Club
Gerardo Del Real: How is the infrastructure of the Soledad project?
David Kelley: You mean in terms of infrastructure to the project and the district?
Gerardo Del Real: Correct. Access to the project, nearby power.
David Kelley: Yeah, that's a really good question because the project's located in Ancash, in central Peru. Ancash is one of the historic mining provinces in Peru. There's the Pierina mine 35 kilometers to the north, and Antamina is 65 kilometers out to the east. So it's one of the historic provinces in Peru where mining has just become part of the culture. Because of that, mining is well accepted.
David Kelley: The communities that are around our project, generally the people that work in the mines immediately to the east of the Soledad project, and there's four operating mines in the district, they come from those two communities, Aija and Recuay. So mining is very much accepted. It's a part of the lifestyle there.
The road network getting to our project is excellent because it's maintained by Lincuna Mines. It's public road access, but it's maintained by Lincuna, who operate their four mines and two processing plants in the district off to the east of our project.
In terms of power, we're not far from the Peruvian grid power system. In fact, part of that grid power is used by Lincuna Mines and supplemented with some hydroelectric power that they've developed themselves. The topography lends itself well to water storage. There's two reservoirs up slope from our project that could be enlarged to store larger amounts of water needed for mine processing.
So really, it sits well from an infrastructure standpoint in a project that could be moved along rapidly because of the benefit of that infrastructure.
Gerardo Del Real: Have you done any metallurgical work for the breccia pipe samples from the Soledad project?
David Kelley: We're just starting that this week. In fact, the first four composite samples are being shipped from Peru. These are coming from breccia pipes one and five. They're going to RDI here in Denver to form the first look at the metallurgical work.
In preparation for that, we've done a very detailed, extensive petrographic and ore microscopy study to identify the mineralogy that we are dealing with, and everything looks very favorable.
David Kelley: The dominant copper mineral on the project, I would say 99% of the mineralization that we see sits in chalcopyrite. Sulfides occur near surface within the first 20 to 35 meters. We get a little bit of digenite.
We actually see a hypogene chalcocite. It's the first time in my career I've seen hypogene chalcocite. Chalcocite normally forms a supergene enrichment mineral that you see in supergene blankets. But these are spectacular, large, thumb-sized crystals of hypogene chalcocite.
Then we get a little bit of supergene chalcocite, supergene covellite, and a few other small minerals like that, minor minerals. But nothing like enargite. This is not a high sulfidation system. We don't see any enargite or copper tied up into that.
We do see, arsenopyrite is very pure petrographically, it's a pure mineral phase. It forms as its own event. It's not intergrown with other minerals, and the metallurgists that have seen the petrographic reports think that that's a very straightforward processing step to be able to separate arsenopyrite from chalcopyrite with PH control on a flotation cell. So we're not too concerned about that.
The gold, interestingly, we see free gold. We see electrum in pyrite on the order of 20 to 100 micron size, and except for the last couple of days I've seen a photomicrograph of the four-millimeter grain of free gold in the sulfide.
So we're actually very optimistic too about the gold and the recovery. We don't know how much of the gold that we see is in that phase, but that test work that we'll be doing at RDI here in Denver will certainly be able to tell us where the gold is occurring and how much of it looks like it'll be recoverable.
In preparation for that too, as a geochemist I'm a little bit of a stickler about sample preservation and making sure that the met work is done on good samples. So we took the extra step to purchase a freezer container and we have that other core facility in Lima. We bring all the core down from the project to Lima to make it easier for people to see when we want to show the core and also to keep it close to the laboratory so we can work with the local service providers there.
But the freezer container is set up in the core facility and all the sulfide rejects go straight from the lab into there, just to keep them from oxidizing and to keep the met work, give the metallurgist the best material to work with so that they can do their best work with the recoveries.
Gerardo Del Real: Excellent. We talked about the community and how it's a mining community. Do you have your surface agreements in place?