Transcript
Automated transcript · Written by software from the replay's audio. It can mishear names and figures; the replay is the record.
0:08 Hello everyone and welcome to Aldebaran Resources Live Summit today hosted by 6. I'm very pleased to introduce our speakers today. We have CEO and Director John E. Black and Chief Geological Officer and Director Dr. Kevin B. Heather. Following the presentation there will be a live Q&A session as per usual, so you can submit your questions at any time using the Q&A panel on the right hand side of the screen and we'll try to get to as many of them as possible.
0:34 And of course this is being recorded and available to watch afterwards on SIX.com. But without any further ado, I'm going to hand it over to you, John, to kick it off. Okay, great. Thanks, Dasha. I'll just give a brief introduction here. I'd like to open by thanking Dasha and Romeo and Cameron and the entire 6 team. We find this a very good format for us to provide a little more information than we can typically provide in a news release coming out. So we thought that today would be a good time to just provide an update for everybody on where we're at with the program. We've recently finished our drilling program for the year as the first heavy snows have arrived and this would be a great moment for us to review what was accomplished this year, what the news flow will be over the next few months as we continue to release drill results from that campaign and more importantly what we wanted to do is to go into a little bit more depth on some very, very exciting geophysical results that we announced last week.
1:26 This is a little bit different than what we're typically announcing with drill holes on a program like this. It's a program that we invested quite a bit of time over the last 2 years to get. We have the results and they provide some some really interesting new views of the project and better ways that we can see what the potential of project is going forward. So We felt this format would allow Kevin to go into a little more detail and let people take a look at why we're so excited about this. So why don't I turn it over to Kevin and we'll let Kevin walk us through what these results mean and more importantly what it means for the next next field season coming up. Thanks Kevin. Okay thanks to the introduction John. I'll just share my screen. Good morning or good afternoon or good evening to whoever you are in the world watching us today.
2:13 Okay, so I think everybody should be able to see my screen okay now. The typical disclaimer, we are a junior company on the TSX and I will be making forward-looking statements and especially since we're talking about geophysics, there will be a lot of forward-looking statements. I think most of you know where we're located. We're located in San Juan, Argentina. Right now, things are booming. We're down in the southwest corner here, just 25 kilometers from Manifigasta's Los Palambres mine in Chile, and just 25 kilometers north of El Pachon and Glencore's project, and about 55 kilometers south of McEwen Copper's Las Azules.
3:01 And then about 500 kilometers north of us is the Filo del Sol and the Jose Maria projects up here. So what are the key takeaways for today? This is actually a photograph from about 10 days ago at our project in our camp, and you can see we got hit by heavy snowfall and very cold temperatures. And so we took the decision to shut down the program for this field season, as did some of the surrounding companies near us as well. And we are currently digging out and recovering all the drill rigs and moving them off the mountain. This shutdown will be for a very short brief period of only probably 3 months and we're really hoping weather permitting that we'll be able to start getting back in in September and start to kick off the new 2022-2023 drill campaign.
4:00 In total we were able to accomplish 14,400 meters of drilling roughly. That was far short of our plan 20 to 25,000 meter campaign we were hoping for. We completed 13 full drill holes. 3 holes were lost and 2 holes we started, but we're basically, 1 got to 7 meters and the other one got to 64 meters before the large snowstorm hit and we had to evacuate everybody off the mountain. We've had a lot of operator issues and so our production rates this year were somewhat disappointing, but it's something that's been experienced by just about all the operators up there this year.
4:53 In terms of our assay results status, we've reported 4 complete holes. We've got 4 holes where we have the assays now and they're under final internal QAQC review. And some of those should be released next week. And we have 8 holes that are still pending part portions of the holes. And we're waiting on those. The labs have greatly increased their turnaround time so we're hoping to get the rest of the drill results out here in a fairly short period of time. And like I mentioned, 2 holes were started but those will be probably complete, those holes will be re-entered and completed next field season.
5:40 I think the most exciting part, which is the main topic for the presentation today, is the results from the recently completed 3D induced polarization and magnetotelluric geophysical survey. We've identified multiple near surface in-pit conductive anomalies that appear to be correlative with where we have mineralization in drill holes and where currently we have waste indicated in the resource block bottle. So those are clear kind of low hanging fruit that could be drilled early on next field season. And we also have a very large 4 kilometer by 3.5 kilometer and 2 kilometer deep conductive anomaly that appears to include and also connect both the Altar Central mineralized system and the Altar East mineralized system and everything in between the 2.
6:46 As well, that same anomaly extends quite a ways to the south, almost a kilometer to a kilometer and a half, and includes what we were previously discussed in an earlier webinar, the Altar Southeast multi-element geochemical anomaly from the Taylor's find survey that we completed a little while ago. I don't wanna go into all the details here, but just for your reference, and you'll have access to this presentation, but these are a list of the drill holes, their azimuths, their dips and their final depths. We've already reported the hole shown in green. The next 3 holes should be out next week. These are the holes that are the detailed step outs from the high grade gold hit that we had in drill hole 45 that was reported some time ago.
7:39 And then the remaining holes are in various states of completion like I previously mentioned. And as those become complete holes and the assays have been QAQC'd, we'll get those out as quickly as possible. So I foresee in the next month or so that we'll be putting out on a more regular basis the results. And then finally, the 2 holes highlighted in red, we will not report, those holes did not go deep enough, they didn't hit any mineralization at these shallow depths. So we'll wait and complete those next year and report them as part of next year's campaign. This is just a quick map to show the distribution. The bulk of the drilling has been done out here at the Radio QDM area as part of our resource definition program and then 3 holes were drilled out here in the Altar Central and Altar East area. These holes have not been reported yet. We're still pending some assays from some of the from the deeper portions of the holes. All of these holes were drilled quite deep and so except for this is the hole that was collared, but only got to 7 meters before we had to shut down.
8:52 So now switching to the geophysics, which I think is the really interesting part here, is we can see a map, and I've highlighted in the yellow circles the areas of the known mineralization, QDM Radio, Altar Central, Altar East and then the Altar Southeast area where we have a nice geochemical and multi-element geochem anomaly that we discussed in previous webinar. And you can see the area that we completed for the three-dimensional IP and MT survey, it's 10 kilometers by 6 kilometers. It took us 2 field seasons to complete this, It's a large area. And so we're gonna really focus on the Altar Central and Altar East area.
9:38 We previously discussed the results from the QDM radio in a webinar back in November, 2021. I don't wanna belabor this. I put this in just for your reference, but induced polarization is a an active geophysical method. We're actually inducing electrical current into the ground and we're measuring 2 properties, the chargeability and the resistivity, and the inverse of the resistivity is the conductivity, so if we have something that's high resistivity, it's low conductivity, and the reverse is, if it's high conductivity, it's low resistivity.
10:24 And this technique typically can look down to 6, 7, maybe 800 meters depth. We also, in parallel, did magnetotellurics. This is a passive geophysical method, and this is basically measuring the electrical current passing through the Earth due to lightning strikes that are occurring 24 hours a day globally. And so we don't induce the electrical current, we're measuring the current that's being generated by lightning strikes. And this methodology, we're measuring resistivity and conductivity. So we've got 2 forms of measuring resistivity and conductivity. We've got the 3D-induced polarization, and we've also got the MT. So we can see whether we get a correspondence between the 2 independent methods. The beauty of MT is it's a very deep looking technique and we can typically see down to 1 to 3 kilometers and in some cases even beyond that.
11:31 So this is just a map again showing the main areas and you can see this is a depth slice of the magnetotellurics resistivity and we can see the bright red areas are areas of very high conductivity so the electricity is passing through these areas, and this is a depth slice at 3,000 meters, and you can see it's very nicely mapping out the QDM radio area, the Altar Central area, and the Altar East area, and also the Altar Southeast area. You'll see there's a number of other anomalies. We have to be a little bit careful with these because they're either at the edge of the survey or they're on single lines. And so we need to be a bit careful and these probably require a little bit more additional lines to really firm up. And you'll see that these other areas have multiple lines crossing them in different directions. So they're much higher confidence.
12:31 Okay, this is a bit of a busy slide. This was in the press release. And what we can see here in the black line, you can see the outline of the conceptual 2021 pit for our resource for Altar Central and Altar East. So within that pit is the 1.4 billion tons roughly of 0.5 copper equivalent. And what I've superimposed on this is the results from the Thales fine geochemistry, and in this case the gold, we could do this with other elements as well, copper and arsenic and bismuth and many others show the same kind of pattern, but we can see that the gold is very strongly highlighting the area of known mineralization.
13:19 And you can see all these little blue dots here and all these over here, those are the drill hole traces from Altar East and Altar Central. And so you can see it's mapping out those quite nicely. And then you can see there's no drilling down here on the Altar Southeast anomaly. The other thing I've superimposed on here in the dashed white line is that resistivity anomaly that I just showed you previously at the 3000 meter elevation. And you can see that it's mapping out something very conductive covering this area as well. But to better see this, what I'm gonna show you now is an East-West cross section here, AA prime, we'll be looking to the north, and then we'll look at another cross-section where we actually have a drill hole that we drilled this year on CC prime, and then finally we'll look at a North-South cross-section quickly, looking to the East, so we get an idea in 3 dimensions what this anomaly looks like and what its correlation to known mineralization is.
14:27 So this is the section East-West, We're looking to the north, and what you can see is you can see the surface. In the blue line, you can see the pit outline. That's the conceptual pit outline. You can see all the drill hole traces. We're showing the copper equivalent grade here. And you can see the resistivity feature here from the magnetotellurics is really mapping out quite nicely the base of the oxidation or the leach cap and when we go into the top of mineralization. And you can see that that anomaly is large. It's roughly 4 kilometers across by 2 kilometers deep. And you'll see when we do the orthogonal cross-section, it's roughly 3 to 3.5 kilometers in the other direction.
15:16 And you can see everywhere where we penetrate that anomaly almost, there's mineralization in the drill holes. And so there's a large area that has remains to be tested with drill holes. And you can see, this is interesting because the current pit has this hump in the bottom and that's basically because all of the previous drilling here in the middle between Altar Central and Altar East is very shallow drilling and therefore there were no resource blocks. So I can show you that, so just to collaborate that this is a real anomaly, I mentioned that we also did the induced current resistivity and IP survey and I'm just going to superimpose that anomaly and I'll bet you barely saw that there was a difference there. But if you look, this is the showing exactly the same geometry. So we have 2 independent geophysical methods showing us that this large conductive feature is indeed real.
16:25 I'll also now just superimpose the 2021 block model on here. And I think you can quickly see that the block model is almost where we have showing us obviously where we have drill holes but is confined to that anomaly and you can see there's large portions of the anomaly that have yet to be drilled. And you can see even some of these drill holes in the middle here, we're just starting to come into some grade, but we're stopped. These are holes that were drilled prior to us acquiring the property. So again, a very, very interesting correlation between the geophysics, the known mineralization and obviously our block model.
17:12 Some of you will remember from previous webinars that I had an hypothesis that maybe we have another younger buried intrusion that's coming in to the Altar Central and Altar East area and I'm just going to superimpose that on here and you can see this is the exact model that I presented probably 3, almost 4 years ago, and we started to think that we might have something buried down below here, because this
17:43 is now showing moly, and moly typically forms a halo around the porphyry systems, and we can see that the moly grades are picking up towards the bottom of all of these holes. And when I superimpose it on here, It matches very nicely with this large conductive feature in the geophysics as well. So further collaboration of both geophysical data, but also geochemical and geological data from the known drilling. Now I'd like to show you an east-west cross-section that's located about 200 to 300 meters north of the section I just showed you. We actually collared a hole here, 221.
18:31 This was collared before we got the final geophysical results. And so we didn't have the benefit of knowing that that big anomaly existed there, but we had a suspicion based on the geological model that I just showed you, that there could be something between. So we started drill hole 221 to make sure that we could get this hole finished before the end of this year's field campaign. So here you can see the section, there you can see the trace of where the hole was intended to go, you can see the pit outline again, and you can see that where we hit the anomaly we have grade.
19:19 And we can see that there's still gaps and areas where there could be extensions to mineralization that are almost in pit. And then there's still this large feature at depth. And you can see at the bottoms of these deeper holes, the grades starting to pick up. So hole 221 is 1 to keep an eye on as we start to get the assay. It's one of the last holes we drilled and So we're still pending assays on this, but that's gonna be 1 to watch, I think.
19:53 This just shows the DCIP, just to show that it also shows this large anomaly. And then if I flip the block model onto here, you can see that there's very little in terms of blocks down in below the pit here, because just no drilling to support additional resources down there. So quite an exciting hole to watch. Okay, now I'd like to just show you a north-south cross-section here, BB prime, just to give you an idea what it looks like in the other direction and to see how it relates to the geochemical anomaly down here at Altar Southeast.
20:41 So again, it's a little bit small, but again, I reference you back to some earlier webinars that I've given to explain the geochemical halo above a porphyry, but typically we see very distinct elements, sweet, that are like a plume of elements coming off the top of the mineralizing porphyry system. And here we can see we get a copper anomaly, we get gold. Here's where we started to collar hole 222. That's the hole that we got to 7 meters and then got snowed out, so that'll be clearly one of the first holes that we go back into next field season and complete that hole to test the anomaly here. We also see that it's associated with indium and bismuth, some of the typical trace elements, and you can see how those same elements are also very nicely highlighting the Altar Central and Altar East area. So this looks very promising to the south here.
21:46 This is the cross section I talked about and you can see the red bar here shows where that geochemical anomaly for Altar Southeast is, it's a multi-element. You can see where hole 222 was collared, the idea was to come down through here. You can see we've got a conductor here that's actually sitting within the pit shell and you can see that if we go along along laterally from that conductor it goes into where we got very nice mineralization and some of these drill holes here and then you can see some of these holes are too short, they never got into the conductor, we got another conductor and for all of these deeper holes, bottom mineralization and never really started to test this deeper target and again reminder of the scale is like 2 to 3 kilometers across so very very big here and I'll just show you again, it's covered by ECI.
22:55 I've mapped that as well. And also, if you look at the block model, you could be currentless areas that are currently being considered as waste or not filled in or go in to resource clear areas that are kind of laying fruit that will convert waste to ore and help better the strip ratio of the deposit. And then clearly
23:26 you can see down here, lots of room to grow potentially this resource as well. So what are the next steps? This is what I the next steps I presented back in March of this year and I just want to show you that we have made progress towards what we were trying to accomplish. We fell short of our drill due just because of some operator issues, but additional drilling may be required in order to do the resupply at the radioporphyry. We'll evaluate that here in the next couple of months and decide whether we can meet the Q4 this year resource up timing or whether we complete some additional drilling in order to do it. But at any rate, we would start that early in the field campaign in October, member of this year, and hopefully have an updated resource by Q1 2023 at the latest.
24:30 We've reported, we'll be reporting here next week additional short step out holes on the QDM high grade gold intercept that we had. The 3DIP and MT is complete. I walked you through some of the results. We now the Taylor Tire product, we're about that data and know some of it, we're just getting the last bits of that in now for the far field areas. And I think I hopefully demonstrated that we've already defined some very compelling near surface in-pit targets and also some deeper large targets that appear to
25:14 correlate with areas of known mineralization based on drilling. And then we're looking at some areas that are a little bit more far field, but that targeting work is still undergoing. And we also completed 5 water monitoring wells as part of our water balance studies moving forward. So the preliminary plan, and this is where we're getting to the end here, is to be keeping up with in the can early September when weather conditions permitting. We hope to mobilize, we have 6 drill rigs to the deck starting in October, 2022. This will clearly depend on rig availability and also financing conditions, market conditions, because obviously the markets right now are a little bit skittish.
26:08 The resource drilling at Radioporphy, if additional drilling is deemed necessary, but As I mentioned previously, this will be evaluated after we receive all the final assay data and we'll make a decision whether we think we can go forward with a resource update at the end of this year as originally planned or whether we think we need a few additional holes to better fill in for that resource update. Like I mentioned, we'll start and complete the 2 holes that were ended prematurely because of snow. We'll start those first thing next season. And then obviously we're working right now on preparing follow-up drilling on some of these new geophysical and geochemical targets that I've just walked you through.
27:00 If what we think this geophysics is telling us is true, there'll be a lot of drilling that needs to be done over the coming field campaign and onward in the future. So this could potentially be a very large system. That's what we've believed right from the beginning and now I'll stop sharing and open things up for questions. Great, thank you so much for the presentation. We have a bunch of questions here but if you have any other questions feel free to submit them now. I have a question about the the supply of drill rigs for next season. What are you doing to secure the rigs and will there be a better supply next drilling season?
27:43 I can jump in and answer that. We are anticipating that the drilling companies will be in a better position to provide more rigs and probably more importantly better trained crews. Part of the trouble this year was not just the rigs, it was whether we had experienced drillers. So ourselves And I know our peers up at Filo experience the same thing with a lot of dropped holes and a lot of just driller errors due to inexperienced drillers. So we hope that they improve and step up their game. They've got a few months now to kind of get their act together on this. And much of what we were doing at PDAC last week was meeting with various drilling companies, including companies that are new companies that are anticipating bringing rigs in and establishing teams in country to address the boom that we're seeing in San Juan right now.
28:30 Got it, great, Thank you. And did the 3D geophysical survey identify any other targets that have not been drilled and did it help targeting at the QDM radio? Kevin, you want to do that one? Yeah, sure. Yeah. As I mentioned, we already, it did help at the QDM radio. That was the focus of the webinar that we gave back in November of 2021. Those who've been following us will remember that This geophysical survey was actually started in early 2021 and we got only about half of the area covered and we're again shut out because of heavy snowfall. And so we had to go back in earlier this field campaign to complete that survey and that we're just now getting the final results. So we focused on the Altar East and Altar Central area because that data was not available to us prior to today and so I advise people if they want to go back and look at the QDM radio area it's in the November 2021 webinar.
29:41 Great, thank you. And all those recordings are up on six.com to watch. When will you know what the drilling program for next field season will look like in terms of like total meters and all that? Probably about August of this year would be my best estimate on that. We've got to receive all the assays we have right now, take a look at that. Kevin and the team are already tearing apart the geophysics to begin to lay that out. And as part of our agreement with Subani Stillwater, we present a plan to them at the end of August for their commentary and observations on that. And we would like to be mobilizing into the camp in September. So I would say we'll see the drill results coming out over the next 2 months. And by August, we'll be in a position to be laying out what the program will look like next year.
30:29 Great. Thank you. Peter has a question for you, Kevin. He's asking, do you have the data on the split of copper between phases found in drilling rather than copper EQ data? For example, extractable copper? Yeah, there's, yeah, there is, he's talking about, I guess, copper that can be extracted by acid leaching, I guess. Yeah, the tops of the holes have been, historically, There is some data, so we do have that information, and if you go and you look, we've outlined all of that distribution of the secondary enrichment blanket in previous webinars as well, and so yeah, we do have some of that data, but it's inconsistent data, It was not historically done on every hole.
31:23 But we do it on our holes at least up until we get through the super gene enrichment. Thank you. And what grades do you need in new areas to be tested at Altar Central, Artal East, and Altar South? That's a good question. And one of the things that why we're so excited about this this new data on this is that as we've we've indicated a lot of our work this year was looking for higher grade zones at east or excuse me at QDM radio and previously some of the deep roots between east and central when we thought those were just 2 separate systems. Now with the emergence of this data, we're seeing anomalies that are right in the pit. And for those to be of importance to us, they just need to be above cutoff because it'd be converting waste to payor or payrock anyway. So anything above 0.2 is economically significant and anything that's similar to our average grade of about 0.5 copper equivalent is good on there. So we don't need as high a grade when we're drilling anomalies within the pit as we do when we're drilling the deeper targets that might require bulk underground mining.
32:35 Thank you. Mark has a question about a specific hole. He says hole 221 is 1,487 meters and complete. Were you seeing typical pore-free mineralization along the length of the hole once in mineralization while logging the hole? Yes. Yeah, I think that's the best way to describe it. We don't like to describe in detail the holes until we have the assays to put out. It's always a little dangerous, but I think it's fair to say that we wouldn't be highlighting a hole like that if it doesn't support our story here. Great, thank you. Mario's asking, beyond the geological resources, how are the geotechnical and metallurgy works going? Do you have in these drilling campaigns plan to advance on these issues?
33:26 We are moving forward. Kevin mentioned in his presentation that we completed 5 water wells this year and that's work that's done both to establish what the water budget and the water characteristics are on the project. So it's feasibility level work that we're doing to prepare for eventual preparation of PEA or pre-feasibility studies on the project. It also helps us on understanding glacier features and just overall water budget in the project area. So we're moving forward with that. We do benefit from a lot of metallurgical data that was collected by the predecessor companies that operated the project. And So we're compiling all of that work and taking a look at that. Until we fully know all the areas of mineralization, we probably won't be in a position to definitively state what recoveries are and what best ways are. But I think it's fair to say right now that it's the very standard porphyry with portions of it that have super gene enrichment. So it opens up the possibility of producing a concentrate, which would be fairly routine and normal concentrate or potentially applying SXCW leach methods to some of the areas that have superchain enrichment.
34:35 In terms of the geotechnical stuff, we've since starting at the beginning of this field campaign, we've installed a much more rigorous and detailed geotechnical logging program. We've been doing that through using consultants out of Tucson, Colin Nicholas, who are world experts in geotech. And so we now have a system in place with our geos that are collecting much more rigorous and detailed geotechnical information prior to the core being manipulated and sampled. Another thing that kind of fits into this project like this with this scale and with the scarcity of large copper projects like this where we interact with a number of major mining companies and they all provide ideas of things we should be doing, things they'd like to see us do to advance the project to that level. So that helps us make sure that we're providing the type of data that they would need to be interested in the project in the future.
35:37 Thank you so much. So when will the next drill results be released? We've got the results for those offset holes around the gold numbers, those are all in right now. And got a little bit of work to write those up, but that should be next week-ish on that coming up. And then the following results, it depends a little bit how we batch those together and how they come up. But I would say by the end of July we'll see another significant batch of the majority of the holes coming out and perhaps another release a little bit later than that. All right, Thank you. Question from Cole. Will drilling the deep geophysical anomaly be the most cost effective way to grow the project?
36:23 Next question is expand the pit and cover more material within the pit to invert or greater. Kevin, do you want to take a stab at that? Yeah, what was the question again? Will drilling the deep geophysical anomaly be the most cost-effective way to grow the project and then asks, expand the pit and cover more material within the pit to inferred or greater? Well, most of the resource right now is indicated and measured. We have very little in the inferred category. So of the 1.4 billion tons we have now, I'd say probably, I'm just off the top of my head here, probably 85% of it is in the indicated and measured categories.
37:09 So 2 things that we would want to do is drill some of those near surface anomaly areas, because those are in the pit And as I mentioned in the talk, we can convert waste to ore. And so those are no brainer places to drill. And by virtue of drilling those areas, you've already drilled down through those. So you might as well keep going and drill the deeper target as well. We don't need to drill off all of that area below, potentially to an indicated or measured category. It just needs to, we need to show that that anomaly is real and once we get quite a few drill holes into it and can demonstrate that those are mineralized, then I think we'll start to get the interest from people about this thing could be very large and etc. We need to see what the grades are going to be etc. But we need to drill that anomaly and it's such a big anomaly that it's going to require multiple holes, widely spaced, to properly test it and then go on from there based on results.
38:20 Alright, well thank you so much to both John and Kevin for taking us through the presentation and the live Q&A. I also want to thank everyone who joined us today and submitted questions. If you think of any follow-up questions following the summit, feel free to reach out directly to the Aldebaran Resources team. Their information can be found on their website at aldebaranresources.com. But I'll pass it back to you, John, if you have any final remarks before we close out. No, thanks Dasha and thanks Kevin for providing this information for us. And as Dasha mentioned, if we didn't get to your questions today or you think of other questions, please approach us. We're more than happy to talk about the project within the limits of what we can say and when we can say it. This geophysical information that was presented in the press release last week and today is really in described today, has really kind of opened up what the next field season will look like on this. We've got a lot more work to do on this and I like it because this points not only to the possibility of more mineralization but it points to mineralization in areas that improves the mineralization we already know about. So it's a pretty significant step change in the project as we move forward. So look forward to getting results out over the next few weeks and months and particularly start to start talking about the plans for next field season. So thanks everybody for your time and please feel free to reach out to us.
