Sure Buddy: BBX’s exploration manager, Tony de Castro, worked as...

Sure Buddy:

BBX’s exploration 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 have still 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.”

The best way for McKenzie to silence those doubters will be to start plonking down some gold bars in the months ahead.

Apologies for the omission. Knock yourselves out

• Share on Facebook
• Share on Twitter
• Share on email
• Share more...