Pretivm Resources Inc. (PVG)

[silver100]

Pretium bulk sample gold grades even better

http://www.mineweb.com/mineweb/content/en/mineweb-gold-news?oid=221864&sn=Detail

The processing of the full 10,302 tonne bulk sample from Pretium’s Valley of the Kings section has now been completed suggesting an overall gold grade of close to 18 g/tonne gold.

Author: Lawrence Williams
Posted: Monday , 16 Dec 2013

LONDON (Mineweb) -

After the furore over the disagreement in methodology over the treatment of the Pretium Resources’ underground bulk sample from its Valley of the Kings section at its Brucejack project in British Columbia, between the company’s two consultants – Strathcona Mineral Services and Snowden Mining Industry Consultants – which led to the withdrawal of the former, now the full 10,302 tonne bulk sample has been processed it appears that the amount of contained gold in it is even higher than initially hoped for by Pretium.

Preliminary figures suggest the sample contained fully 5,865 ounces of gold – equivalent to a gold grade of 17.7 g/tonne. The company’s own original estimate from its drilling and grab sampling had been only for 4,000 ounces of contained gold. In fact, once the ball mill and flotation cell clean-up has been completed at the mill in the U.S.A. where the bulk sample has been processed it is expected that a few more ounces of gold will be recovered which could bring the overall sample grade up to around 18 g/tonne. A high grade result by any standards.

While the above results are preliminary and as provided by the mill operator Strategic Minerals LLC under the supervision of Snowden, it is not expected final results will vary much from those announced by Pretium on Friday. The company’s consultants will now work on producing an updated NI 43-101 Valley of the Kings resource estimate expected later this month with the NI 43-101 compliant Technical Report to follow.

The initial disagreement over sampling the bulk sample between Strathcona and Snowden highlighted some of the problems in evaluating the kind of deposit Pretium has found – with some very high grade stringers within a matrix of far lower grade material. Strathcona utilised a tower sampling method which must have managed to miss the high grades altogether suggesting that there was not a potentially mineable resource. With Snowden and Pretium confident that the gold was there and the initial sample results by Strathcona had to give a misleading picture of the true resource value, it was decided that the best result would be achieved by processing the whole sample – which is indeed what has since taken place. Strathcona disagreed and withdrew from the project amidst some perhaps intemperate statements – one of which that there were ."no valid gold mineral resources" there will likely come back to haunt it.

A bit of history here – Strathcona was the consultant responsible for exposing the Bre-X fraud in 1997 in Indonesia – a fraud which lingers long in the minds of many Canadian junior resource investors who may have lost fortunes when the scam was exposed. The Strathcona withdrawal from the Pretium program, coupled with its stated reasoning behind it, raised reminders of Bre-X – was this another mining scam exposed? This was not withstanding the very strong reputations of the Pretium Board and CEO, Bob Quartermain, nor of the other major consultants working on the program, Snowden, despite which Pretium shares plunged dramatically within a tottering junior gold resource sector before making at least a decent recovery once the next set of bulk sample process results came out.

See: Pretium vindicated – over 4,000 gold ounces in first bulk sample result

The initial sharp drop in the Pretium share price at the Strathcona withdrawal raised talk of class action law suits against the company, but these seem to have fallen away and perhaps been replaced by the lawyers now going after Strathcona instead – one of the less pleasant attributes of today’s litigation prone business environment.

But now there is confirmation that there will be a resource at the Valley of the Kings section of Pretium’s Brucejack deposit, the company can proceed with the next step of the revised resource assessments and Technical Report – the next steps on the way to a mining decision.