Source: Bob Moriarty for Streetwise Reports 06/08/2018
Bob Moriarty of 321 Gold discusses the status of this company’s mineral resource.
I’ve been fairly quiet on the Novo Resources Corp. (NVO:TSX.V; NSRPF:OTCQX) front for months in anticipation of assay results that will better define the project.
I believe that I have pretty much understood the potential for gold in the Pilbara since Quinton Hennigh, Mark Creasy and I sat down in Mark’s office to discuss the Pilbara basin at length for hours in June of 2009. It was my first visit to the area of five in total. Quinton and I spent another week together in the field pretty much verifying his theory.
Mark has more money than God; God naturally not particularly needing much more than pocket change, and it took him three years, until the summer of 2012 to agree to the same terms he wanted in the summer of 2009. I wrote my first piece in August of 2012 and again, pretty much got it. I made it clear I thought this had Vits potential and Novo would be a 10-100 bagger. It does and it did.
I like Beaton’s Creek a lot and it would be a mine today if it weren’t located right next to a $100 million mill. Only an idiot would put two $100 million mills right next to each other. Beaton’s Creek ore is oxide and the mill at Millennium Minerals is an oxide mill. It actually never occurred to me that they couldn’t add two plus two. But they can’t. Novo got it, Millennium didn’t.
Then Karratha came up and Quinton got it right away. That was the big Kahuna. He put out a press release in July that gave it away. He ran out and staked half of the Southern Hemisphere and started drilling. That’s where the problems started. Comet Well and Purdy’s Reward are coarse gold systems. The gold is big, all nuggets.
I should throw this in because 99.99% of investors, indeed even professionals in the mining industry, don’t know there is a definition for a nugget. A nugget is a piece of gold that when dropped from 30 inches above a metal gold pan makes a noise.
The vast majority of placer gold is small. I had a gold project in Tanzania where a gram of gold would be 2,000-3,000 individual pieces. If you dropped them from 30 inches above a metal gold pan some of them would still be floating to earth a week later.
Nuggety gold systems are a bugger to measure according to the industry Bible/Ten Commandments, 43-101. Think of an ounce of gold being in a cube and trying to find it by drilling into a cubic meter of rock. Literally you can’t. That’s a vital to understand fact that I brought up six months or more ago and only two guys in the industry understand. That would be Keith Barron and me.
You can drill nuggety gold until the cows come home and you will not come up with an accurate 43-101 grade. When Novo drilled Beaton’s Creek where the gold was far smaller Quinton came up with a 43-101 grade and put it out the results just the way he was required to. I took a gold pan and panned a sample and told Quinton that his numbers were bullshit; the grade was a lot higher than he thought. You may safely believe that he thought I had lost my mind.
When Novo did a 5,000-ton trial mining test, it confirmed the actual grade mined was 50% higher than the 43-101 drilling suggested. When you drill nuggety gold that can be measured such as that at Beaton’s Creek you will almost always have higher grade than your 43-101 tells you.
I made the very valid point as far back as September of 2017 that the gold at Comet Well and Purdy’s is unconventional and you have to think outside the box to understand how to approach it. 43-101 cannot bind you in your thinking.
I have been in three different industries where to be successful you needed specialist knowledge. That would be flying, computers and mining. Flying is pretty easy. Once a pilot knows what direction up is and the difference between right and left, he pretty much gets it. Pull back, go up. Push forward, go down. How much easier can it be?
Computers on the other hand can be a handful. Some of the most successful programmers taught themselves. I don’t know how they got the education but they did. I think there could be a lot of voodoo to it. Certainly the college courses I have seen were always years behind what the industry was doing.
Mining and exploration require a whole slew of knowledge about a lot of things. Geology, chemistry, economics and finance are all part of just the basics. I know of no industry with so many PhDs and advanced degrees. Not only that, they also have to be conversant with the reporting requirements of 43-101, JORC and local government rules and regulations to avoid legal issues.
In the process of filling their heads with a lot of information perhaps the budding mining folks have forgotten to think for themselves.
I only know of three people who understand the Karratha gold potential. I am sure there are more but there are only three that I can point to and say, he gets it. That would be Quinton Hennigh, Keith Barron and me. But if you took a Roman geologist or Spanish mine manager and showed them the gold at Karratha, they would instantly get it and would have been mining 18 months ago. Because they weren’t overeducated and didn’t have the noose of 43-101 around their necks.
Quinton Hennigh is an exploration geologist, one of the top three in the world but maybe he has forgotten one important thing. Exploration is a journey, not the destination. …read more
From:: The Gold Report