SolGold tables updated estimate for Alpala Deposit

SolGold Plc [SOLG-TSX, LSE; SLGGF-OTC] shares were active Friday January 4 after the Brisbane-based company released a NI 43-101-compliant technical report containing an updated resource estimate for the Alpala Deposit, located on the company’s Cascabel Project in northern Ecuador.

According to the technical report, the Alpala mineral resource now stands at 2.0 billion tonnes grading 0.60% copper equivalent (at 0.2% copper equivalent cut-off) in the indicated category, and 900 million tonnes of 0.35% copper equivalent (at 0.2% copper equivalent cut-off) in the inferred category.

The contained metal content stands at 8.4 million tonnes of copper and 19.4 million ounces of gold in the indicated category and 2.5 million tonnes of copper and 3.8 million ounces of gold in the inferred category.

SolGold says it sees the potential for further growth ahead of a 2019 drilling campaign, which it said will continue to expand the deposit in a number of areas including Alpala SE, Alpala NW, Trivinio, and Alpala Western Limb.

SolGold shares eased 3.08% or $0.02 to 63 cents on Friday to trade in a 52-week range of 71 cents and 31.5 cents.

The Cascabel Project is a porphyry copper-gold deposit located in the Imbabura province of northwestern Ecuador. It lies just off the main road, a three-hour drive north of Ecuador’s capital city, Quito. Northern Ecuador lies within the under-explored northern section of the richly endowed Andean Copper Belt, which extends from Chile in the south to Colombia in the north and then north-west into Panama.

The tenement lies on the margin of the Eocene and Miocene metallogenic belts which are renowned for hosting some of the world’s largest porphyry copper and gold deposits, the like giant La Escondida Copper Mine in Chile, which is the world’s largest producer of copper and hosted within the same age host rocks as Cascabel.

To date, exploration activity has identified 15 potential porphyry centres at Cascabel, at Alpala Central, Alpala Northwest, Alpala Southeast, Hematite Hill, Alpala East, Alpala West, Alpala South, Moran, Trivinio, Carmen, Cristal, Aguinaga, Tandayama-America, and Parambas.

SolGold published a maiden mineral reserve estimate for Alpala in January 2018. At that time, the estimate stood at 1.08 billion tonnes of 0.68% copper equivalent (7.4 million tonnes of copper equivalent) at 0.3% copper equivalent cut off in the indicated and inferred category.

Of that amount, the company said 40% was in the indicated resource category.

SRK Consulting (U.K.) was retained by SolGold to prepare the updated resource estimate and technical report on the Alpala deposit. It is based on 68,173 assays, with 66,739 representing diamond drill core samples and 1,434 assays representing rock-saw channel samples cut from surface rock exposures.