Feasibility study under way at Caber — Zinc deposit could feed Noranda mill at Matagami

A feasibility study, now under way, will determine whether underground development will go ahead on the Caber zinc-copper deposit, 35 km west of Matagami, Que.

Noranda (NOR-T) is examining the feasibility of driving a decline to develop the Caber deposit as feed for the mill at Matagami. Property-holder Southern Africa Minerals (SAF-T) has dealt Noranda an option to earn a 70% interest in the property by spending $6 million on development, taking down private placements to a total value of $2.85 million, and bringing the project into production. The most recent private placement was for $400,000, at $1.375 a share.

Caber has a resource of 412,600 tonnes with grades of 12.4% zinc, 1% copper and 15 grams silver per tonne.

Under the development plan currently being investigated, Noranda would drive a decline between the Caber deposit and another prospect, Caber North. Once Caber is in production, Caber North could be developed from the same ramp.

There are now five drills on the Caber property, two of which are drilling on dip and strike extensions of Caber to define the size and shape of the deposit, possibly increasing the size of the resource. A third drill is on Caber North investigating the C zone, where earlier drilling intersected 4.5 metres grading 7% zinc and 0.7% copper, and 15.7 metres grading 2.6% zinc and 2.3% copper. It will also test extensions of Caber North’s B zone and Intragabbro zone.

The other two drills on the property have been turned over to exploration. The Caber property lies on a 5-km strike length of the Matagami camp’s productive formation, the Key Tuffite horizon. One of the drills will be used in a 10-hole investigation of the Key Tuffite and Lower Tuffite horizons near Caber North, where four earlier holes drilled into the Lower Tuffite encountered zinc and copper mineralization. Caber North is on the Key Tuffite, and the discovery of mineralization stratigraphically below the Caber North deposits offers hope that another deposit may exist on the Lower Tuffite as well.

The fifth drill is testing the Tuffite horizons elsewhere on the property, including a target 1 km east of the main Caber deposit. There, hole NCB99-55 intersected a banded chert with disseminated sphalerite resembling mineralization found in Caber North’s Lower Tuffite horizon. That the new intersection is a kilometre away from the other mineralization suggests that there may be other exhalative vents in the area that could have formed other sulphide deposits.

The feasibility study is nearly complete, and results of analyses on core samples from current drilling are expected in mid-March.