Teck gets piece of Donner Resources

One of the biggest players in the Labrador exploration scene has caught the eye of a major producer.

Teck (TEK-T) has agreed to finance exploration work on the South Voisey’s Bay project of Donner Resources (DRZ-V) by purchasing a large block of Donner shares. The project is 90 km south of the original Voisey’s Bay deposit, now owned by Inco.

Teck has agreed to acquire 1.4 million units of Donner capital, at $1.25 per unit, for an aggregate price of $1.75 million. Each unit will consist of one common share, one A warrant and one B warrant.

Each A warrant will entitle Teck to acquire one additional common share of Donner at $2 per share for a period of one year. Each B warrant will entitle Teck to acquire one additional common share of Donner, for a period of two years and at a discount to Donner’s prevailing market price.

In addition, Donner has agreed to grant to Teck the exclusive right to acquire up to half of Donner’s interest in any or all of Donner’s property interests in Labrador. Donner owns more than 4,500 Labrador claims and has options to acquire almost 4,000 more.

Over the past 18 months, Donner has conducted extensive exploration work on its South Voisey’s Bay project. Work to date has shown that the project hosts a regionally extensive troctolite sheet similar to the feeder system at Voisey’s Bay.

In 1995, the company completed extensive airborne and reconnaissance surveys, which led to the identification of a 15-km-long series of gossan zones containing low copper, nickel and cobalt values.

The gossans are associated with a complex, northwest-trending series of irregular magnetic and electromagnetic anomalies.

The company’s geological team believes nickel occurrences found on the property last season may be part of a lower-grade “halo” surrounding zones of massive copper-nickel-cobalt mineralization. Preliminary work on the property identified a 15-km-long belt of nickel occurrences and geological anomalies associated with a complex series of olivine gabbro sills and intrusions.

Almost all the holes drilled this season encountered a sill-like mafic intrusion (50-150 metres thick) containing sulphide mineralization.

This mineralization consists of disseminated zones within the sill and narrow zones

of semi-massive sulphides at

the contact between the sill

and the underlying basement gneisses. (In places, semi-massive, coarse-grained sulphide mineralization, 0.5-1.5 metres thick, was encountered

at the gneiss contact.)

Disseminated zones of sulphide mineralization returned assays of up to 7.2 metres grading 0.3% nickel, 0.22% copper and 0.03% cobalt. Mineralization at the contact with the basement gneisses returned narrow intervals of up to 1.38% copper, 0.55% nickel and 0.084% cobalt.

Core samples from the disseminated mineralization encountered in drill hole 96-01 were submitted to the University of Toronto so that the style of sulphide mineralization of these rocks could be compared with that of the Voisey’s Bay deposit.

The university’s report concluded that the samples from this zone are essentially similar to the major rock types of the Western Extension troctolite sheet (the feeder component of the Voisey’s Bay deposit).

So far, drilling has focused on the central part of the South Voisey’s Bay project area and has consisted of shallow holes designed to evaluate gossan zones and near-surface geophysical targets.

Geological and geophysical data show that the feeder zone extends for at least 5 km northwest and 5 km southeast of the drill-tested area.