East Asia Puts Indonesian Portfolio Together

Indonesia has had an up-and-down experience with junior exploration companies, having hosted staking rushes first by a mass of Australian juniors, then, infamously, by Canadians in the mid-1990s. And while major companies like Freeport McMoRan Copper and Gold (FCX-N) and Inco have long and durable histories in the country, it takes an icy-veined junior explorer to navigate the country’s complex mineral laws and frequently difficult logistics.

East Asia Minerals (EAS-V) has now assembled a property package in Indonesia that, while it plays second fiddle to the company’s Mongolian uranium assets, should keep the company busy on good exploration targets.

Four of the five projects are in Aceh province, a northern Sumatran region notable for both good geology and the difficult politics of a local autonomy movement with anti-secular Islamist goals. Indonesian governance, too, has been in a state of flux since the fall of the Suharto government, with a program of decentralization that — while it makes administrative life temporarily more complicated — may soothe some of the regional tensions that make for unrest.

So while there is no hiding the political risk in Aceh, the property portfolio is interesting enough to make the game worth the candle.

The Tangse property, about 100 km southeast of regional capital Banda Aceh, was previously explored by CRA, the Australian arm of Rio Tinto (RTP-N, RIO-L, RIO-A). CRA outlined a copper-molybdenum resource 5 km long and at least 1 km wide on the property, and a historical resource put its tonnage at 600 million tonnes at “low grades” — a higher-grade, partly supergene-enriched deposit was 30 million tonnes grading 0.3% to 0.8% copper and 0.02% to 0.03% molybdenum. East Asia holds an 80% interest.

At Miwah, East Asia has an 85% interest in a 300-sq.-km property with epithermal gold mineralization, showing long intersections at around 1 gram. Another prospect on the same ground is a hydrothermal breccia zone with gold and copper.

A third property, Takengon, in which East Asia holds 75%, also has both epithermal gold and porphyry-style copper mineralization. The chief attraction there is the Collins gold prospect, where a fault-controlled stockwork system about 800 metres long and 400 metres wide has returned gold assays as high as 11 grams per tonne.

Two other properties in Aceh, southeast of Takengon, are part of the Tangse land deal: Barisan 1 and 2. Small porphyry stocks host copper-grold mineralization at Barisan, including the Upper Tengkereng porphyry with 41 million tonnes grading 0.24% copper and 0.25 gram gold per tonne, the Lower Tengkereng porphyry, with 15 million tonnes grading 0.16% copper and 0.38 gram gold per tonne, and the Upper Ise-Ise porphyry, hosting 10 million tonnes that average 0.2% copper and 0.17 gram gold.

An epithermal gold prospect on the Barisan land package, Abong, has a resource of 14.7 million tonnes at 1.2 grams gold and 3.1 grams silver per tonne.

East Asia has a 70% interest in an old Bre-X property, where (perhaps fortunately) previous operators did little work: Sangihe Island, off the northeastern tip of Sulawesi. The targets here are high-sulphidation epithermal gold deposits hosted by pyroclastic rocks, which occur on several surface prospects. Old drilling by Ashton Mining in the early 1990s turned up gold grades in the 1-gram to 4-gram range over widths of 14 to 90 metres.