Avalon gets top drill grades in the Lake zone

Avalon Ventures (AVL-T) set out to define the eastern, southern and western margins of the Lake zone at its Thor Lake rare metals project near Yellowknife, NWT, but encouraging drill results on both the west and south sides of the deposit have the company going back to do more drilling in February.

Results from the western and southern extensions produced some of the best results that Avalon has seen so far in both grade and thickness of the rare earth element mineralization.

Avalon completed 31 drill holes during July, August and September. Since 2007, the company has drilled a total 16,640 metres in 85 drill holes. Avalon had planned to put out an interim resource in 2008 but slow assay time and technical challenges in modeling the basal zone resource forced the company to abandon that idea. A resource estimate is targeted for mid-January to be used in a prefeasibility study to be completed later in 2009.

The highest combination of width and grade seen so far on the project was intersected on the southeastern margin of the Lake zone. Hole L08-118 returned 185.4 metres grading 1.6% REO with 12% of the TREO consisting of the more valuable heavy rare earth oxides (HREO).

(TREO includes all 14 rare earth elements plus yttrium, expressed in oxide from while HREO includes the metals with heavier weights, starting with europium to lutetium plus yttrium, as oxides.)

The high grade basal zone in this same hole, L08-118, returned 17.4 metres grading 2.71% TREO and 34% HREO including 8 metres grading 3.71% TREO with 36% HREO.

Other highlights include L08-117 where a 45.1-metre intercept in the basal zone averaged 1.9% TREO with 23% HREO including 16 metres grading 2.66% TREO with 22% HREO.

Another basal zone intersection was hole detected in L08-129, which returned 22 meters grading 2.25% TREO with 30% HREO.

This basal zone is open to the south for potential expansion, and is backed up by historical airborne magnetic data that indicates a magnetic anomaly similar to that associated with the known Lake zone deposit extending over a broad untested area for about 1 km to the south.

Testing on the basal zone so far has shown a high proportion of heavy rare earth elements.

The Lake zone also contains high levels of other rare metals including tantalum, niobium, zirconium and gallium, which could be valuable byproducts for rare earth element production.

Rare earth oxide prices have been on the rise over the past three years though some prices have softened lately due to the economic downturn.

For example, neodymium oxide currently goes for US$20.50 per kg, dysprosium oxide is at US$88.53 per kg and terbium oxide is at US$573 per kg.