MinQuest (ASX:MNQ) has announced it has received the land use approval for its Marg base metals project in Canada’s Yukon Territory. A drill program is expected to start shortly and will be aimed at substantially increasing the resource estimate at Marg which currently contains 11.74Mt at 1.27% copper, 3.23% zinc, 1.55% lead 0.61 g/t gold and 39.8 g/t silver. As the mineralization is still open along strike and at depth, it shouldn’t be too difficult for MinQuest to indeed increase the resources.
Instead of aiming at resource expansion, MinQuest should also focus on defining higher grade zones on the project as the current rock value per tonne is less than $200/t (assuming 100% recoveries.) It’s doable, but the scoping study will be extremely interesting to see if there’s value in developing the Marg project. The mix of base metals and precious metals is very interesting and selling a gold/silver stream could be an interesting way to finance the construction cost of this project further down the road.
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Disclosure: The author holds no position in MinQuest. Please see our disclaimer for current positions.