Drills Turning: ECR, BYN, ELO
I am just finishing the write-up of an interview with Cartier Resources’ (ECR.V) CEO Philippe Cloutier for motherlodetv.net. Here’s the link. Cloutier has just raised 11 million dollars for what he refers to as his BIG project. 500 diamond drill holes in ten targets along a 12 to 14 kilometre string of fairly shallow targets. Two drills spring, summer and fall and when it freezes up and the swampy parts are accessible, four or five drills.
Cloutier, in our interview, wanted to make it very clear that this was not “prospecting with a drill” (Cartier did that last year), these are real targets which need drill driven definition. And ECR is only drilling shallow, 200-300 meter holes despite the fact that deposits on the Larder Lake/Cadillac trend can extend a thousand meters down, as Cartier demonstrates at its Chimo mine project along the trend.
The key thing about drilling for a junior exploration company is that it produces “hard news”, actual assays, core photos as well as a wealth of geological information. In Cartier’s case, with their previous prospecting drilling in hand, the BIG project will be shooting fish in a barrel. The only question being, “How big are the fish?”
Tara Christie’s Banyan Gold (BYN.V) has been drilling at the AurMac project in Yukon since the first of April. Today BYN reported the preliminary results of the first “19 diamond drillholes and 4500 m of the 30,000 metre program”.
AurMac is interesting because, pretty much everywhere that BYN has drilled, they have found gold. Low grade but lots of it. “The inferred MRE for the AurMac Project was prepared on February 6, 2024, and consisted of 7,003,000 ounces of gold” running an average grade of 0.63 gpt.
Today’s release was focused on the presence of visible gold in core pulled from holes drilled in, what Banyan hopes, is a continuation of the high-grade gold it reported in February. 15 meters of 9.3 gpt is a very decent interval.
A jaded junior market shrugged off the VG with BYN shares actually falling half a cent. Again, not a huge surprise in the present market. However, the story here is that today’s 19 holes and 4500 meters of core will be assayed and reported. The drills will keep turning and news should flow steadily all spring and well into the fall. Christie has a track record of adding ounces to Banyan at a few dollars an ounce. If this year’s program is tracking higher grade material, the cost per ounce will fall. Which, eventually, the market will notice.
It must have been the day for drilling press releases as Tom Larsen, CEO of Eloro (ELO.T) announced further drilling at the company’s Iska Iska project.
A new definition drill program comprised of 4,300m of diamond drilling in 8 holes that will commence shortly is focussed on upgrading and expanding high grade tin mineralization hosted in intrusion and phreatomagmatic breccia (TIB and TPMB, respectively) and the shallower higher grade silver mineralized zone which is above the tin zone.
Iska Iska is a huge, polymetallic and metalurgically complex silver/tin/zinc deposit which might well turn into two world-class mines: one for the silver/zinc, the other focused on the tin. The recent drilling in the tin “domain” ELO went into the tin bearing breccia and found “visible coarse-grained high temperature cassiterite which is likely to be amenable to gravity separation”. This was a critical discovery as it radically reduces the likely costs of tin recovery.
Extending and defining the tin domain, while also confirming the high grade silver, will likely result in a revised Mineral Resource Estimate and, in due course, a significantly improved Preliminary Economic Assessment. Eloro is an explorer. Its value increases as its potential value to an acquirer increases. Drilling to expand high-grade fits that plan exactly.
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For the junior resource market, drilling is the lifeblood of news. Actually, financing and having a drill program is critical to the success of a junior. IP, VTEM, soil samples are all very useful to geologists but they almost never move the market. What moves the markets is news, hard news—assayed core.
Each of the companies in this article will have “hard news” regularly. At the moment, in the present junior market, hard news may not move the share price much. As the market firms up, as it seems to be, those releases should create gains. Each of these companies have fully financed drill programs which means the news flow is baked in.
At these prices Cartier, Banyan and Eloro are very much worth a look. Thank me later.
(Disclaimer: I own shares in Cartier, Banyan and Eloro. I may buy or sell at any time. This is not investment advice. Do your own due diligence. Call the CEO.)