I don't think you can sum up native copper in two words like you...

I don't think you can sum up native copper in two words like you have.

It is not just a question of being able to separate it, the mixture of sulphides with native copper complicates things in a number of ways.

For instance when you receive the assay result it won't incorporate what percentage of the copper from the drill hole is in native form and how much is composed of copper sulphides or oxides or other transitional copper ores. This complicates the process for anyone developing a mine as you really need to know the proportion of native copper to sulphides and oxides all through the deposit to be able to figure out how much of each particular ore type needs processing and to design the processing circuit. I'm not sure how they get around this problem. The only thing I can think of is that they would need to run costly assay schemes when they do resource drilling to get an estimate of the contribution of native copper to the metal content of each mineralised drill interval.

I took a quick look at the other drill hole ZX-18020. Going by the geological descriptions there seems to be potential for high grades in three of the intervals within the 55m interval although once again the volumetric estimates of the minerals in those intervals have very broad ranges, so much so that's its almost impossible to make any estimate from them.

Nevertheless I have given it a go using some extra clues from the announcement in the deeper interval between 53.65 m and 57.14 that is said to contain chalcopyrite, chalcocite, malachite, chrysocolla between 0.5% and 40% in visual estimate. Figure1 shows a photo of visible oxides in the sub-interval 56.67m to 57.00m. Given the internal diameter of the HQ triple core DD is 61mm I estimate the recovered high grade visible oxides in that photo to be about 0.5m long. The photo in Figure5 says the oxide is mainly malachite (57.48% Cu by weight). Based on the above and assuming a large fraction of the mineralisation is actually contained in that 0.5m interval, I estimate the grade of the deepest 3.49m interval (between 53.65 m and 57.14) to be 8.23% Cu.

There isn't enough information to try and estimate what the copper grade of the other two potentially high grade intervals might be.

My guess is that the hole may produce three high grade intervals with the deepest interval being of the highest grade so I've assumed the grade of the deepest interval is greater than the shallower two intervals.

7.85m from 24.95m (my estimate < 8.23% Cu)

4.85m from 38.55m (my estimate <8.23% Cu) and

3.49m from 56.67m (my estimate at 8.23% Cu)

Based on the above and assuming the first two intervals grade 5% Cu (ie lower than my upper estimate for the third interval) and the Cu grade of the remainder of the hole is negligible then I estimate that the entire 55m interval will grade 1.75% Cu. If you halve all these grade estimates you get 55m at 0.87%Cu and if you double my original grade estimates you get 55m at 3.5% Cu. I'd go with somewhere between the two lower estimates (ie between 55m at 0.87%Cu and 55m at 1.75% Cu).

Just some fun so don't take it too seriously and DYOR. Esh