New zone and porphyry target at Lobo

Vancouver — Mindoro Resources (MIO-T) has intersected what may be a new ore shoot in the West Drift area of its Lobo gold-copper project in the Philippines. Also, preliminary results from ongoing geophysical work would seem to indicate one or more porphyry copper-gold systems.

Situated on Luzon Island, the property includes a past-producing underground copper mine.

Drilling along the Sampson epithermal vein breccia structure toward the old Lobo mine intersected low-grade gold mineralization, which appears to be on the margins of an ore shoot.

Meanwhile, hole 38 intersected 12 metres grading 7.42 grams gold per tonne at a vertical depth of 120 metres, including 2.5 metres grading 29.46 grams gold. High grades of copper and silver were encountered in holes 34 and 36, in association with a strong quartz-barite-sulphide breccia structure.

Reconnaissance work in 2002 defined two epithermal veins, Sampson and Camo, each of which is thought to be more than 2 km long and up to 19 metres wide. The veins, exposed by old mine workings, contain widely distributed high-grade gold-silver-copper mineralization.

The Sampson trend is 800 metres from the parallel Camo trend, where delineation drilling was recently completed on the SW Breccia gold ore shoot as part of a resource calculation.

The drilling is evaluating high-grade gold mineralization, which was reported, but not mined, in the West Drift area during a small copper mining operation in the 1960s.

Now that it has financing in place, Mindoro intends to explore its 144-sq.-km land package, which covers the Lobo and Archangel projects. Drill testing will focus on porphyry copper-gold targets.

A larger-capacity drill rig is expected to arrive in the next few months, and another, portable drill rig has started testing targets along the breccia trends at Lobo.

An induced-polarization survey tested the area for porphyry-style copper-gold mineralization. A large, strong IP chargeability anomaly has been outlined on the prospect known as Pica. The anomaly is flanked by a resistivity high, and the core of the chargeability anomaly coincides with a magnetic high.

The company plans to test the potential of other magnetic highs on the property and says it expects to drill the Pica prospect early next year.