Renowned geologist and director of Tower Resources, Ltd TWRFF, Stu Averill, spoke to Benzinga on Tuesday to discuss Tower’s results from its latest drilling program, which led to two additional discovery zones on its Rabbit North property in Kamloops, B.C.
On March 30, Tower released the assays from holes 39 and 40, the former of which “significantly exceed(ed) average grade of (the) lightning zone with strong indicated continuity.” On April 5, the company reported the assays from hole 41, which led to the discovery of porphyry-style copper, gold and molybdenum mineralization. Tower named the third discovery zone “Rainbow” after naming its first and second discoveries on the property Lightning and Thunder, respectively.
Despite discovering a third zone, notably containing copper, which senior expert at McKinsey & Company, Ken Hoffman, said at Prospectors and Developers Association Conference (PDAC) on March 5 “will see its value soar over the next decade,” the market reacted slightly negatively to the news. The move lower was accelerated on April 10 after John Kaiser of Kaiser Research Online released a podcast on his website calling into question the extent of Tower’s discoveries.
Kaiser also took digs at Averill, the latter who founded Overburden Drilling Management (ODM) and helped to expose the massive Bre-X scandal, which forced Canada to regulate professional geology and the securities exchange to implement the National Instrument 43-101.
Stu Averill On Kaiser’s Podcast And What Tower’s Latest Results Have Shown The Company
“He’s guessing away there,” Averill said about Kaiser’s podcast, adding, “He’s speculating entirely and making wrong assumptions and going from there.”
"For us, it was an extremely successful program that (Kaiser) seems to have totally forgotten was an exploration program --and it was immediately successful-- and he dissed it like we were doing resource drilling, as if we already knew the orientation of the zone before somehow or other," the geologist said.
“We’ve only drilled four holes on a whole entirely new zone –preplanned holes, okay—preplanned based on permitting,” he said, later adding “It was a huge step forward and there’s a lot of potential for scale.”
Averill is more focused on what Tower has discovered, however, and when asked if the results from holes 39-41 are what Averill expected, the geologist said, "Yes! Yes!" Averill then went on to explain the importance of the unexpected discovery of copper.
“I think it’s really important, for a couple of reasons. The fact that that’s what our neighbors are focused on, that’s New Gold and Teck, and that from everything I hear these days the market is focused on two things –copper and lithium,” he said. “It’s a commodity that people want and from what we see, we have the molybdenum in this zone, which we never had before, and that tells you from what we know on the deposit models for porphyry that that’s drawing you toward the center of porphyry system."
“We’ve been on the outskirts before. The reason we’re getting the better grades now is because we’re closer to the middle,” Averill added. “We see scale” he added, “we’re finally getting into the epicenter here.”
Tower expects to receive the assays from hole 42 soon and will release them to the market after they’ve been analyzed. Of the hole, Averill said “the rainbow zone will be better because the chalcopyrite is more extensive and more abundant, there’s a longer interval and it's more plentiful.”
He added, “the molybdenite, which is a great pathfinder for us, it’s only there in small amounts, but it’s actually as abundant, I believe even a little more abundant, than what Teck was recovering next door at Highland Valley.” Teck Resources, Ltd TECK operates a copper and molybdenum mine next door to Tower, while New Gold, Inc NGD has a copper and gold mine on the other side of Tower’s Rabbit North property.
The company is also expecting results from three further drill holes, two of which it drilled on the Dominic Lake train and one that it drilled back at the Lightening zone, the area of its initial discovery.
“There’s gold everywhere here on this property, it’s unusual in that way, it’s very much like Rainy River, which we discovered with the same technology,” Averill said. “In a conventional drilling program most of your samples, except when you’re in the zone, are gonna give you background, which is less than 5 parts per billion. We rarely get less than 5 parts per billion. We typically get 100 parts per billion or more, so 0.1 grams, 0.2 grams –lots and lots of that material.”
“We’re going for large scale open-pit type mineralization here,” he said. "I'd like investors to know that these were strictly exploration holes and if they remember that, they'll appreciate how successful this program actually was."
The company will plan its next drilling program as soon as all assays are received from its last program.
Read Next: Legendary Geologist Stu Averill At PDAC Talks Tower's Latest Gold Discovery
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