Source Exploration posts maiden resource for San Acacio

Source Exploration‘s (SOP-V) past-producing San Acacio deposit, just 5 km northeast of Capstone Mining‘s (CS-T) prolific Cozamin mine, has an indicated resource of 1.49 million tonnes at an average grade of 84.9 grams silver per tonne and 0.19 gram gold per tonne for 4.05 million oz. contained silver and 9,000 oz. gold, the junior explorer reported today.

In addition, the inferred resource was calculated to be 3.44 million tonnes at an average grade of 80 grams silver and 0.16 gram gold for contained silver of 8.84 million oz. and 17,400 oz. gold. The base case for the resource estimate used a silver equivalent cut-off grade of 45 grams per tonne.

San Acacio lies within the Veta Grande mining camp, about 10 km northeast of the city of Zacatecas and 1000 meters southeast of the town of Veta Grande. (The city of Zacatecas is 680 km south of the U.S. border in Texas and 540 km northwest of Mexico City.)

The property covers the southeastern half of the Veta Grande vein system and a number of other parallel, steeply dipping polymetallic epithermal veins in the San Acacio underground mine. According to the company’s 2008 technical report on the deposit, the Veta Grande vein is the most prolific of four sub-parallel vein systems that run through the Zacatecas mining district in central Mexico.

Workings at the past producer extend to a vertical depth of 335 meters and about 7 km along strike. Source Exploration’s management believes there is potential to expand the near-surface resource amenable to open-pit mining and the deeper resource for underground mining and says an underground drill program is underway to potentially extend to depth the high-grade mineralized shoots mined from the historical stopes.

Drilling has intersected the Veta Grande vein system at a depth of 161 metres below the lowest operating level of the San Acacio mine. And Source Exploration’s underground program is targeting high priority areas below historical high-grade oxide stopes, Brian Robertson, the company’s president and chief executive, noted in a press release.

Over the last two decades a number of historical estimates have been prepared for San Acacio, the most recent in 1995 by Silver Standard (SSO-T, SSRI-Q), which calculated that the project contained 2.47 million tonnes grading 182.4 grams silver per tonne, or roughly 14.5 million oz. silver, above a vertical depth of 100 metres.

After optioning the property in late 1994, Silver Standard in 1995 completed 32 diamond drill holes from surface totaling 4,060 meters. In 1996, a structural geological review was undertaken, but Silver Standard relinquished the property in 1997 due to other priorities.

Source Exploration acquired the property late in 2006 from Sterling Mining of Mexico.

The database used for Source Exploration’s current National Instrument 43-101 compliant resource contains 8,147 metres of diamond drill hole data, supplemented by 457 underground chip samples. Trench data was available but not used in the estimation. Data was sourced from the 1997 Silver Standard exploration program, 2004-2006 Sterling Mining and more recent work by Source Exploration in 2009-2010.

The Zacatecas silver belt is one of the most prolific silver producing areas in the world, hosting the Fresnillo and Zacatecas silver mines that together have churned out more than 1.5 billion oz. silver.

The Vancouver-based junior’s stock closed down 3.5¢ or 18.42% at 15.5¢ per share.

With 23.8 million shares outstanding, the company has traded in a 52-week range of 8¢-40¢ per share.