AMERICAS — Royal Oak puts exploration focus on Porcupine

The Porcupine camp in northern Ontario will eat up the lion’s share of the 1994 exploration budget of Royal Oak Mines (TSE).

Of the $6 million that is earmarked for exploration, almost $4 million will be controlled out of Royal Oak’s Timmins office.

(The gold producer, which operates several Canadian mines, including the Giant at Yellowknife, N.W.T., recently caused a sensation by mounting a bid for Lac Minerals.)

Royal Oak’s spending configuration is appropriate, given the company’s enviable land position in the Porcupine camp.

“Royal Oak really has some of the best pieces of real estate in the Abitibi (greenstone belt),” says chief exploration geologist Paul Coad. “In the Timmins area, we have about 25,000 acres of property. A lot of it straddles the Destor-Porcupine Fault, and the next major portion of it — about 12,000 acres — covers the Nighthawk Lake structure.

“Much of the ground we do cover holds the historic producers in the camp, like the Hollinger, the McIntyre, the Broulan, the Hallnor and the Pamour, which we’re currently mining; plus, we have an option and mining agreement with Kinross Gold (TSE) on the Hoyle property.”

The Timmins camp has produced about 60 million oz. gold, and Royal Oak Vice-president Ross Burns estimates that McIntyre and Hollinger produced more than half of that total.

“As well, the Pamour produced about 4.5 million oz. and the Hallnor, 1.6 million oz.,” Burns adds. “Over half the production from Timmins has come from the Hollinger-McIntyre-Coniaurum complex.

“What’s interesting is that if you total the production from the Hallnor, the Broulan, the Pamour and Hoyle, they produced 48.5 million tons of ore and 6.4 million oz. gold and counting, so it’s a significant part of the camp.” Royal Oak has already spent about $1.5 million refurbishing the shaft at the Hallnor, and will spend another $800,000 dewatering in preparation for deep exploration drilling.

Coad says that, below the 2,400-ft. level — from the Broulan right through to Hoyle — no deep exploration drilling has been done. But all the orebodies are open down-plunge and downdip.

“What we plan to do is basically look for the down-plunge continuation of the Hallnor vein structures on to the Broulan ground,” he adds. “We plan to do some short holes off the level, both down- and up-plunge, to check for the continuation of these vein structures. The bulk of the drilling will be deep holes from the 14th level, drilling between 2,000 and 2,500 ft. down. “There is a very good chance that these vein systems will continue on to the Broulan property.”

In 1993, Royal Oak went in looking for sub-parallel vein structures south of Hallnor, with the idea that “stacking” does occur in the camp. “Lo and behold, we did find three brand-new vein structures on surface,” Coad says. “Now, we’re in the process of completing a detailed 200 scale compilation on surface over the entire strip between the Broulan and Hoyle, with the idea of looking for other vein structures high up near surface. “When the Hallnor was found, they quickly went underground and they were so focused they never looked up near surface, so we’re going to be doing that as an exploration effort later this year as well.”

Burns and Coad believe there is potential at Hallnor for another one million tons plus, in the range of 0.4 oz. gold per ton.

“One thing we’ve recognized in the Pamour system is that the ore often occurs in two shoots, what we call an upper and a lower shoot in the sediments,” Code explains. “And if you take thMining industry faces a growing cost in absenteeism

at thinking back over to the Hallnor, we know that we’ve found an upper mine and a lower mine with similar grades. And there’s a very good chance that this could even be repeated downdip with another repeated mine at depth on the plunge line.”

Pamour produces about 3,600 tons a day. As well, ore from the Hoyle property is being processed through the Pamour mill. In February, Royal Oak drilled about 11,000 ft. in 10 holes in the greywackes on the Hoyle property to test for the down-plunge continuation of ore already discovered in the property’s central zone.

Burns notes that the Pamour and the Hoyle are really one continuous orebody, although there is a property boundary.

“If it were found today, the orebody would probably be mined completely differently,” he says. “It probably would be an enormous open pit. This system has produced about 48 million tons of ore, but with the reserves we have now, it will be well over that, in the 50-to-60-million-ton range — a massive orebody.

“Although the grade has been fairly low, the orebody is very large.” Prior to drilling the Hoyle property, a geological reserve of 350,000 tons grading 0.128 in the central zone was calculated. The idea then was to step out along strike and see if the orebody would continue down-plunge. “We were confident that it would and, sure enough, we’ve been able to trace the zone 3,000 ft. down-plunge to the east, where there is an intersection of 0.24 oz. over 18 ft. and 0.171 oz. over 15.5 ft.,” says Coad. “That’s on a 200-ft. spaced section, and this wide spacing shows that the system is hanging in. Now we just have to tighten up the drilling.”

At Royal Oak’s Nighthawk Lake project, two drills ran constantly from February to April. Results have not yet been made public, though Coad does say it was a good year for exploration on the lake. Twenty-one thousand feet were drilled in 23 holes.

The Nighthawk Lake mine is just south of Highway 101, off the road that Royal Oak is stripping to prepare the site for an open-pit mine. Royal Oak estimates a reserve there of about 153,000 tons running about 0.09 oz. “What’s interesting is that this Nighthawk Lake structure continues to the east, toward the old Aquarius operation which Asarco mined in the past, and farther down is St Andrew Goldfields.

“This is the first time we’ve been able to get in here and do all this focused drilling, and we’re starting to get a good handle on the ore controls.”

Moving north, Trader Resource (TSE), in which Royal Oak has a 41.2% interest, just completed a $410,000 drill program on the Mikwam property, on the Casa Berardi structure. The property runs for 21.5 miles km along strike and covers two and a half townships. The eastern boundary of the property ties on to TVX ground in Quebec.

A total of 9,491 ft. were drilled in the prospective A-8 area, and results have confirmed the existence of a mineralized zone within an iron formation. In addition, specific sites along the strike length of the property exhibit the necessary features required to host a “Casa Berardi-type” gold deposit but have yet to be tested.

The next phase of drilling will be aimed at establishing the plunge limits of the main mineralized zone, which remains untested. The work will also test for the depth extensions of other historic intersections elsewhere in the A-8 area.

As well, a deep drill program is planned at Matachewan, another old mine, which produced 956,117 oz. grading about 0.1 oz.

“We have a resource outlined there, from the old Matachewan and Young-Davidson properties, of 4.7 million tons grading 0.117 oz.,” says Coad. “This equates to about 550,000 oz. in the geological resource category. What we’re doing this year is a round of deep drilling, which we hope will double that resource.”

The deepest hole Royal Oak drilled, back in 1990, turned up two significant intersections — 0.139 oz. over 37 ft. and 0.176 oz. over 25 ft. — in the same hole.

“That’s significant because it tells us we can look forward to doing bulk-type mining,” Coad adds. “Also, we’re seeing multiple lenses, which are due to a stacking effect.

“So the upside is very good here, especially in light of the fact that when you go east of Matheson, everybody is finding significant orebodies down at depth, so we’re quite confident we’re going to come into something quite strong.”

Drilling will begin this fall. And another program is in the works on the Upper Beaver property east of Kirkland Lake, where, just along strike, Sudbury Contact has announced a find. Geophysical anomalies on the contiguous Lac McVittie property will be targeted as well.

“Most of our exploration money is directed at drilling,” Burns says. “We do a small amount of geophysics, but we do a lot of drilling and I think that’s what has given us a lot of success.

“That way, we don’t have to guess; we put a drill hole down and we know. We conserve our money and put it mostly out into drilling and then back into the interpretation of those results and the next phase of drilling. “One hit in a gold camp means nothing — it’s the next 20 hits that count.” — The author is a freelance writer who lives in South Porcupine, Ont.