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Andrew Todd
Flagship Minerals has muscled its way into the multi-million-ounce club, tabling a monster 2.1-million-ounce JORC-compliant resource for its newly named Isidora Norte gold porphyry deposit in northern Chile.
The resource clocks in at a hefty 115.2 million tonnes grading 0.56g/t gold, but perhaps more importantly, a massive 91 per cent of the inventory – representing 1.9 million ounces – already sits in the confidence-boosting measured and indicated categories, giving the project a strong early development foundation.
The deposit, previously known as the Pantanillo project, sits in the famed Atacama mining region, 120km east of the inland city of Copiapo.
The resource estimate, compiled by the respected Chilean consultancy Bmining, outlines a deposit with significant processing options.
It comprises 840,000 ounces of oxide and mixed material amenable to lower-cost dump-and-heap leach processing, with the remaining 1.25 million ounces classified as sulphides suitable for conventional carbon-in-leach (CIL) processing.
Crucially, the mineralisation starts right from surface and remains open in multiple directions, pointing to the potential for substantial further growth.
The already multi-million-ounce resource appears to have the legs for a mine life stretching well beyond a decade, potentially underpinning a production profile well above the company’s previously flagged conceptual target of 100,000 ounces of gold per year.
‘A JORC-compliant pit constrained 2.1Moz gold mineral resource estimate represents a transformational milestone for Flagship.’
Flagship Minerals managing director Paul Lock
If those sorts of numbers do bear out, it would represent a serious-scale gold operation by any normal measure. However, with the yellow metal still trading around the A$6500-an-ounce mark, the sheer scale of a two-million-ounce development could start to take on real significance.
Isidora sits squarely within the prolific Maricunga gold belt, a 200km-long district that hosts a conga line of multi-million-ounce gold deposits.
The project rubs shoulders with giants, including Barrick and Newmont’s 27.3-million-ounce Norte Abierto project and Kinross’ 10.2-million-ounce Maricunga and 9.5-million-ounce Lobo-Marte deposits.
In this part of the world, big discoveries are the norm, not the exception.
In preparation for the maiden JORC-compliant resource, Flagship says it has constrained its inventory within a pit shell using a gold price of US$3646 per ounce (A$5040), leaving plenty of upside for extra ounces and future economic studies.
The company is now looking to build on its success, with additional drilling planned in and around the pit shell to increase the oxide and mixed material component of the resource.
There also appears to be plenty of blue sky, with multiple high-priority drill targets identified along trend and at other prospects within the project area.
Flagship Minerals managing director Paul Lock said: “Delivering a JORC-compliant pit constrained 2.1Moz gold mineral resource estimate represents a transformational milestone for Flagship Minerals, confirming Isidora as a substantial gold development project within the gold peer group.”
Against the backdrop of massive regional copper-gold investment in the Atacama, Flagship’s own journey at Isidora Norte began with a shrewd, low-cost game-changing deal.
The company secured a five-year option to acquire the project for a total of just US$12.6 million (A$21 million). Based on the project’s previous foreign resource estimate of 1.05 million ounces of gold, this works out to a remarkably low acquisition cost of around US$13 (A$21.50) per ounce.
To jump from 1.05 million to holding a 2.1-million-ounce resource is a serious step up for any junior and one that was only made possible through the breakthrough deep dive into historic drilling at the project. For just under A$3 million, Flagship acquired a massive 32GB of digital data from the project’s previous owner, mining major Anglo American.
The company estimates it would have cost more than A$30 million to replicate the dataset, which included 183 drill holes for almost 33,000m of drilling, including 13,939 metres of diamond core and nearly 19,000 assays.
Thanks to this treasure trove of data, a massive percentage of the ounces now sits in the higher-confidence measured and indicated categories in one of the planet’s most revered gold belts.
Flagship has not only delivered on its low-cost, ounce-add ambitions, it looks to have laid a formidable foundation for the future of its project, with more drilling and economic studies soon to come.
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