Positive results from three of four drill holes have Northisle Copper and Gold Inc. excited.
“Results received to date from the verification drill program clearly support our view that Red Dog will qualify for inclusion in the overall Hushamu project,” said Northisle President Jack McClintock.
“The results to date show that this year’s drilling is confirming the results obtained from the 1980s and 1990s drilling program, which is good news,” said McClintock.
“We are also excited by the possibility that Red Dog may be larger than thought given that the mineralized zone intersected in the third hole extends beyond the depth level of the 1991 drill hole,” McClintock said.
The goal of the four-hole drill program is to confirm the historical Red Dog resource which would allow it to be included in the Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA) that is currently under way for the Hushamu deposit.
A historical resource is one that has not been verified, and one that was claimed prior to the $6-billion Bre-X gold scandal (1997) when “a company could basically say what it wanted and there was no real hard and fast rules,” McClintock said in a previous interview.
The drill holes are “an important step towards verifying the resource and being able to include Red Dog in the PEA as a potential source of higher-grade feed during the initial start-up period for Hushamu,” McClintock said. A PEA is a scoping study that looks at the economics and how much work has to get done to get deposits into production.
“We eagerly await the results for the remaining hole from this season’s verification drill program. Being able to include Red Dog as a qualified resource in the Hushamu PEA has the potential to significantly benefit the overall scope and economics of the project,” he said.
“Once results are in from all test holes, the data will be sent to an independent qualified person, who will calculate the resource for Red Dog.
“His resource calculation will replace the historical resource and Northisle will be able to include it in the preliminary economic assessment.”
If a mine does go ahead it would potentially be on the same scale as the Island Copper Mine which closed in 1995. The Northisle mine would employ between 500 and 600 people.
The North Island Copper-Gold Project is situated approximately 15 to 40 kilometres southwest of Port Hardy and contains the Hushamu Deposit and five other partially explored copper-gold porphyry occurrences.