Los Cerros Limited (ASX: LCL) has used the first Purchase Order*(*PO) under the terms of the Los Cerros / Hongkong Ausino Strategic Partnership Agreement (SPA) to acquire a diamond drill rig to drive larger and more cost-effective drill programmes in its Colombian projects.
Ausino has commenced acquiring the extensive list of capital items and consumables including major items such as an Atlas Copco C5C diamond drill rig and drill rods. The SPA is a significant strategic initiative by Los Cerros to fund approximately $2 million of drilling and geophysics activity across the company’s extensive holdings in Colombia and is expected to be the focus of on-ground activity for up to the next 18 months.
Los Cerros’ Managing Director, Jason Stirbinskis, said thatthrough owning its own rig and similar assets the company expects to realise material savings in its exploration programmes in the long term whilst also driving a steady flow of drilling and geophysics activity.
As a priority, the company’s first drilling programme will focus on the Tesorito and Chuscal gold porphyry/epithermal targets and possibly the Miraflores deposit as a result of recent and ongoing revelations from the Company’s review of the Miraflores structural controls.
The drilling is intended to start as soon as possible allowing for COVID-19 restrictions and shipping logistics.
The company is very encouraged by the recently completed geochemical targeting and profiling work conducted by Fathom Geophysicswhich identified a compelling porphyry target at Chuscal, and gave further weight to two other priority porphyry targets defined via other vectoring techniques,” Mr Stirbinskis said.
“The planned drilling programme is intended to test these targets in addition to further developing our understanding of the high grade epithermal veins overprinting the Chuscal target area and to drill the Tesorito Porphyry roughly 1km north of Chuscal and just ~500m from the proposed plant site defined in the Company’s Miraflores Feasibility Study.”
The 2017 Tesorito drill programme included impressive intercepts such as:
Mr Stirbinskis said the drill programme and subsequent interpretive work at Tesorito suggests there is an internal structure to the distribution of higher gold grades within the relatively uniform backdrop of lower grade material and that the porphyry extends further north beyond the limits of the 2017 drill program.
At the Miraflores deposit reviewing historical results continues. 3D modelling has focussed on understanding the orientation and relationships of several vein sets that carry high grade gold within the background mineralised breccia.
Mr Stirbinskis said the exercise has revealed several zones of interest both within the current resource model, but with sparse data, and also extending beyond the defined resource.
“The developing work at Miraflores is very promising and could lead to the definition of higher grade regions within the existing Reserve and potentially grow the size of the Resource with additional mineralisation beyond the current 250m x 280m wide breccia pipe,” Mr Stirbinskis said.
“The team are currently validating their interpretation with field work and additional observations of the extensive core library. We will keep the market informed of this development which could quite possibly elevate Miraflores to a candidate for 2020 first round drilling.”
Longer term, Los Cerros has aspirations to conduct IP programmes and drilling over other targets within the Quinchia Gold Project and within the ~90kHa of the Andes Gold Project where the company has identified many compelling targets through extensive surface sampling and mapping.