Metallurgical testing opens up potential for NSW silver project

Explorer Silver Mines Ltd (ASX: SVL) believes it has made a positive step forward through metallurgical test work on its rich Webbs silver project in New South Wales that showed the deposit may be amenable to cyanide extraction which offers potential for production of silver doré.

More testwork is required to adequately test this concept.

The Webbs prospect is in the New England belt of northern NSW and is 40 kilometres from Glen Innnes.

The company announced a series of new drill results today that included hole DDH21 with 6.9 metres grading 213 grams/tonne silver, 0.12% copper, 0.79% lead and 0.83% zinc from 21.1m depth, including 1m @ 1,130 g/t Ag, 0.46% Cu, 1.5% Pb and 1.51% Zn.

Hole DDH22 intersects hit 17.4m @ 194 g/t Ag, 0.18% Cu, 0.46% Pb and 1.43% Zn from 30m depth while a re-assay on hole DDH16 produced a higher assay of 1m @ 11,212 g/t Ag.

The latest 19 diamond drill holes were designed to infill the previous reverse circulation drill pattern, to assist in geological interpretation and test deeper targets.

Silver Mines chief executive Charles Straw said: “the bottle roll metallurgical results constitute an exciting development for the Webbs project.

“Though very preliminary in nature, the results demonstrate the production of silver doré may be possible. If so, this could have a significant positive impact on the project. At the same time results from the diamond drilling are in line with expectations based on previous RC results.”

Straw said results from this early stage evaluation that at least some of the silver at Webbs is cyanide soluble, thereby indicating the production of silver doré may be possible.

He said an updated resource estimate for Webbs is being prepared. However, the company is still awaiting assay results for several key diamond drill holes which need to be included in the resource estimate.

This new resource estimate may be released in early 2012.

Additional drilling at Webbs is planned in early 2012 to expand the resource base. This drilling will test deeper high grade targets as well as several near-surface gaps in the existing drill pattern.

The existing inferred resource for Webbs is 1.23 million tonnes grading 256 g/t Ag (8.2 oz/t) for a contained 10.19 M oz silver.

The copper, zinc and lead mineralisation within the resource represents about 25% of the mineral content. – Mineweb.com

Tags: Silver, Silver Mines, silver mining, silver mining companies, silver mining industry, Webbs silver project

Posted by Silver Guru on Dec 22 2011. Filed under Silver mining. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry