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Equitas Resources only acquired the Garland nickel-cobalt-PGM property in September 2014, but it’s already seeing good results.
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Equitas Resources (TSXV:EQT) only acquired the Garland nickel-cobalt-PGM property in September 2014, but it’s already seeing good results.
The company announced Wednesday that a VTEM Plus airborne survey at the property has identified nine areas of conductivity that are prospective for nickel-copper sulfides, and its share price shot up over 20 percent as a result. It was sitting at $0.105, up 23.53 percent, by the end of the day.
The survey was comprised of 645 line kilometers of north-south-oriented flight lines at 300-meter line spacing. Key results include the fact that most responses are either at the very limit of, or significantly deeper than, the detection limits of historic surveys. Furthermore, targets include conductivity trends up to 1 kilometer long, with no previous drilling.
All in all, the company believes that the “overall nature of the anomalies highlights the potential for discovery of buried Voisey’s Bay analogues at the Garland Property.”
A significant neighbor
Garland is located about 30 kilometers southeast of Vale’s (NYSE:VALE) Voisey’s Bay mine in Labrador, Canada, so it’s perhaps not surprising that Equitas is seeing possible similarities between the two.
It’s also definitely not a bad thing that those potential likenesses exist. In its press release about acquiring Garland, Equitas states that Voisey’s Bay began production back in 2005, and at that time was said to have reserves of 17.2 million tonnes of ore grading 2.38 percent nickel, 1.34 percent copper and 0.11 percent cobalt. Vale’s Q1 2015 results show that the mine put out 13,500 tonnes of nickel during the period, up 6.6 percent from the preceding quarter.
Explaining further about the relationship between Garland and Voisey’s Bay, Everett Makela, vice president of exploration at Equitas, states in Wednesday’s release, “[t]he east-west strike of the majority of anomalies is notable, in that the major structural controller on emplacement at Voisey’s Bay was the east-west trending Gardar-Voisey’s Bay fault system, a prominent structural feature on the Garland property. Many of the anomalies display good correlation with east-west and northeast lineaments as interpreted from the known geology, magnetics and topography.”
Makela also notes, “[t]he observable trends of many of the anomalies, up to 1 km or greater, lend further encouragement for discovery of significant mineralized systems. The overall nature of the interpreted anomalies is in accord with our exploration model for Voisey’s Bay style mineralization on the property being overlain by flat-lying, sheet-like intrusive bodies.”
Next steps
Given the results released Wednesday, Equitas is getting ready for a summer drill program at Garland that’s set to start in late June. According to the company, the program will include mapping and prospecting, plus “30 line-km of large loop EM survey, and up to 4000m of diamond drilling.”
The company has already submitted work permits to the government and is currently in the process of evaluating proposals from service providers. It will certainly be interesting to see how the program goes, and whether Equitas turns out to be right about Garland’s similarities to Voisey’s Bay.
Securities Disclosure: I, Charlotte McLeod, hold no direct investment interest in any company mentioned in this article.
