So looks like BBX have proven that it is El Dorado rather than an illusion. Of course we all knew that a long time ago.
Good to revisit the past. It's going to be a lot of fun revisiting the past when we're the highest grade producer on the planet!
https://twitter.com/aus_business/status/899557460012355585
Sceptics doubt BBXMinerals’ Brazilian gold find
Criticsdoubt whether BBX Minerals’ discoveries will ever come to anything.
Paul Garvey,August 19, 2017
Deep inthe middle of the Amazon rainforest sits a project that is either one of therichest concentrations of gold mineralisation seen in recent times or amodern-day case of alchemy that is bound to leave investors in tears.
Australian-listedBBX Minerals, a little-known and tightly held exploration company based inPerth, has in recent months been reporting a steady stream of spectacular goldgrades from sampling at its Tres Estados and Ema gold projects in centralBrazil.
Thetests, based on an assaying system devised by BBX, are recovering up to 360grams of gold per tonne of rock from the project — dramatically higher than thesorts of grades typically seen in the business, where mines can operateprofitably off grades of less than 2g per tonne.
Therarely seen grades from Tres Estados and Ema have caught the imagination ofinvestors. The stock is up more than 2000 per cent over the past two years andhas more than doubled over the past three months as expectations build that thecompany might be on to an especially valuable discovery. It has become a hottopic of discussion on the internet chat rooms as speculators wonder about thepotential riches the projects could deliver.
But thestory has also attracted plenty of doubters. The metallurgy of the deposits inparticular has come under scrutiny, with some industry veterans sceptical aboutwhether the gold within the deposits can ever be extracted economically.
BBX haspreviously had issues with testing its samples from Brazilian projects. Back inlate 2015, shares in the company spiked when it announced it had seen traces ofvisible gold in drill core from its Juma East project. But conventional methodsof assaying — the laboratory process by which mineral samples are tested todetermine their metal content — failed to detect anything, and the stockquickly crashed back to earth.
Sincethen, BBX has been working to perfect a new method of testing its samples. Eachstep of the way, the amounts of gold and silver recovered from the samples haveclimbed higher and higher.
OnMonday, BBX announced that a 5kg sample of rock from its Ema project hadyielded 299.3g per tonne gold and 1971.6g per tonne silver, while a bulk samplefrom Tres Estados contained up to 360g per tonne gold. The announcement wasaccompanied by photos of the buttons of gold metal extracted from the samples.
WarwickGrigor, who has spent decades working and investing in the junior resourcessector, is among those deeply cynical about whether BBX and its discoverieswill ever come to anything. His main concern is whether the assaying methods ofBBX will ever be able to translate into an economic commercial-scale processingplant.
“At theend of the day any of these fancy grades they are reporting are meaninglessunless you can apply the methodology not just to getting an assay but topouring gold bars. No one has ever been able to do it,” Grigor tells TheWeekend Australian. “These guys will just be another casualty, as willtheir shareholders.”
Grigor,who runs Far East Capital, says he has seen similar examples of mineralisationin the past that usually “ended up being scams or they never went anywhere”.
BBX, hesays, would have to buck the trend if it was to convert its finds into viablemines.
“BBX seems to be specialising in the business of using its proprietary assayingtechniques to demonstrate gold where no one else can find it,” he says. “Bravo.Alchemy is alive and well.”
BBX haskept a deliberately low profile to date, eschewing the usual promotionalcircuit trodden by attention-hungry junior explorers in favour of building itsunderstanding of just what it is sitting on in Brazil. The company is run bythe New Zealand-based Jeff McKenzie, a former banker who spent 33 years withANZ including stints as the general manager of the bank’s Beijing branch andtime as the regional head of the North Asian commodity team.
Its chairman, Michael Schmulian, is a former country manager for WMC Resources inBrazil and also served as the South American exploration manager for gold heavyweight AngloGold Ashanti.
BBX’sexploration manager, Tony de Castro, worked as a senior mine and exploration geologist for WMC for over 19 years, both in Brazil and Australia.
Speaking from his office in New Zealand, McKenzie says he is well aware of the company’s doubters but is determined to prove them wrong.
“There are people making comments when they’ve never been and seen the project;they’re saying it won’t work, but we believe we are developing a process that we should be able to scale up to commercial production, (although) we havestill got a lot of work to do,” he says.
A drilling program that will start next week should go a long way to determining the extent and scale of the mineralisation at the projects, while BBX has already applied for trial mining licences over both Tres Estados and Ema.
Such are the gold grades being recovered that a future small-scale trial mining operation could deliver the same sort of cash from a much larger conventional gold mine, at just a fraction of the upfront cost.
That scenario would rely on BBX further perfecting and scaling up the assaying techniques it has been using, but McKenzie is adamant the company is on the right track. “We’ve flown under the radar — everything we’ve announced is factual,” he says.
“There may be soothsayers and others who say it doesn’t work; we know what we’re getting from our test work. The pictures we put out of those gold buttons were a direct result from the fire assay so we are doing something right.”
100% ore! Avg 40g/t Au 1km x 200m to EOH all holes, OP mining 2019, page-180
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