There usually isn’t a big (or even any) difference between the press release announcing the summary of a technical report and the data that are actually in the technical report. Rounding errors can always happen of course but in Vanstar’s (VSR.V) case, independent consultant SRK decided to amend the mining cost of waste material which means that suddenly quite a few additional ounces of gold were added to the consolidated resource estimate. Almost 400,000 ounces to be precise and the final technical report now contains 2 million ounces of gold in the indicated resource estimate and 3.6 million ounces of gold in the inferred resource at a grade of respectively 0.84 g/t gold and 0.87 g/t gold.
This means the approximately 22,000 meters of drilling in the 2020-2022 era resulted in an addition of about 2.4 million ounces of gold while approximately 36% of the ounces are now in the indicated resource category versus 0% in 2019.
That’s a nice surprise and even the grade is holding up. Nelligan will never be a high-grade project or mine and economies of scale will be important should this project ever be developed. And economies of scale are obviously still just one part of the equation as you can’t have those economies of scale without having a sufficiently large resource. And coming out with a 5.6 million ounce in all categories is a good evolution.
And it won’t end here. IAMgold has kicked off another 10,000 meter drill program to complete some infill drilling, testing some areas for resource expansion and to evaluate some of the new exploration targets on the property.
Disclosure: The author has a long position in Vanstar Mining. Vanstar is a sponsor of the website. Please read our disclaimer.
