Red Rock Resources (LON:RRR) updated the market today with new sample results from the Migori gold project in Kenya (click here to view). It seems that good progress in being made on the ground; quoting one line from the announcement, which should encourage investors: "The results confirm the economic potential of the tailings, and the existence of further exploration targets suitable for early follow-up in the eastern license and at Nyarongi". We asked Chairman Andrew Bell if he could expand on todays' news for the benefit of investors.
Here's what he had to say:
MM:. Can you give our readers a brief overview of the significance of today's update from Migori?
AB: In 1982 a Kenya-based company conducted sampling and metallurgical testwork at the old Macalder tailings. Some work was said to be carried out in Kenya, some in Australia, and some at Imperial College. In 1985 Mackay and Schellman quoted these results in some work they produced, but had not been able to source the original data. That was three years later, and they couldn't track down the details. So in 2010 it is impossible. We ran some numbers on the conclusions as to volume, grades, and recoverability, using today's metal prices, and hypothesized just under $200,000,000 of recoverable metal. But this was as we recognized quite unreliable. There was no alternative to going back and redrilling, resampling, doing cross and long sections, doing metallurgy, and coming up with figures that could be relied on and a process path that would enable us to implement the recovery of the metals. This is what we have done.
So far the figures for base metals agree quite well with the old figures. The copper grades reported by previous work in the calcine dumps looked unrealistically high, and our figures are lower, but still good. The sulphide copper figures agree well, our cobalt readings are a bit lower grade, especially in the sulphides. Also our zinc is a bit lower, which is an artifact of the upper detection limit of 1% in our ICP test: this factor means our calcine tailings copper grade is slightly low too. Overall there is good agreement, which increases slightly our confidence in the rest of the work done at that time. The other results, which are encouraging, show that we are already identifying areas outside those already explored where…
