Concordia looks to build on Argentinean assets

Being part of the team that unearthed one of the world’s great copper-gold deposits in Oyu Tolgoi hasn’t left Ed Flood to rest on his laurels.

The founding president and former deputy chair of Ivanhoe Mines (IVN-N, IVN-T) is now throwing his energy into developing silver mines in Argentina through Concordia Resource (CCN-V).

With Flood and his 35 years of mining experience at the helm, he is serving as president and chive executive, Concordia has been busy doing two key deals down in the South American country.

The first was acquiring an option to take a 100% stake in the La Providencia silver mine, which hosted historic production of between 250 to 400 thousand tonnes of ore at an average head grade of 250 grams silver per tonne.

Concordia got the drills turning at the project at the beginning of September and Flood says the company is looking to get a compliant resource estimate out shortly by duplicating results from historic production and historic estimates.

That historic work has led him to believe that there is the potential to outline 20 mill oz. of silver by the end of this year.

La Providencia sits in highlands of the Puna region of northwestern Argentina. The property covers 30 sq. km at an elevation of 4,200 metres but is accessible by road and is 260-km from San Salvador de Jujuy, the capital of the Jujuy Province.

As with most past producing mines, infrastructure at the site is good with access to gas pipelines, power lines, railroad, and nearby highway access to Chile.

The La Providencia deposit was discovered in 1969 and turned out over five million ounces of silver between 1986 and 1997 from ore grading between 400 grams and 500 grams per tonne silver.

Concordia says the deposit is hosted by Plio-Pleistocene, poorly consolidated, continental sediments, consisting of sandstones and conglomerates preserved in an 18 km-long pull-apart basin within a basement of Ordovician clastic sediments. The basin, it says, hosts a number of occurrences of what have previously been interpreted as redbed-type copper and silver mineralization.

But it’s at the second project in the company’s pipeline where things could get very interesting.

Being part of the massive Oyu Tolgoi copper-gold porphyry has evidently left a taste for the giant mineralization style in Floods’ mouth as he is hoping to strike pay dirt again at the Cerro Amarillo project.

The property hosts a copper-gold porphyry at the southern end of the world famous El Teniente belt – a belt that hosts some of the world greatest coppery porphyry projects, such as Anglo American‘s (AAL-L) Los Bronces copper and molybdenum mine and Codelco‘s El Teniente underground copper mine.

Those two mines, however, benefit from falling on the Chilean side of the border.

Concordia’s property lies on the Argentinean side in the province of Mendoza, where cyanide usage, and hence heap leaching is prohibited.

That fact, combined with the remoteness of the project has left Cerro Amarillo un-drilled despite the prospectiveness of the ground.

While it is early, thus far the company is describing Cerro Amarillo as a gold-rich porphyry property containing two partially explored mineralized porphyry systems and four unexplored color anomalies.

The two porphyry occurrences are known as Cerro Amarillo and Cajon Grande.

Concordia says that the data collected to date indicates fertile gold-rich copper, molybdenum and gold porphyry systems.

As summer approaches in the southern hemisphere, the company will be mounting an exploration campaign that is expected to lead to first-stage drill testing of the Cerro Amarillo occurrence.

Concordia has 52 months to decide if it wants to exercise its option to acquire a 100% interest in the properties.

The company remains well funded with over $30 million in cash and has roughly 60 million shares outstanding. In Toronto on Oct. 17 its shares were trading for 54¢ on a volume of 55,000 shares.