Ecuador Mining News May

Company News

Dundee Precious Metals is buying out INV Metals at a 63% premium to their previous closing share price. I feel obligated to make some Crocodile Dundee jokes: "That's not a buyout, that's a buyout" and "I don't mean to put down your black widow spider, but the Loma Larga project can kill a man in eight seconds, just by lookin' at him."

As background INV Metals has a late stage development project called Loma Larga that is in Azuay province. The city of Cuenca recently held a referrendum where the locals voted overwhelmingly to not allow mining in a large area that includes Loma Larga. Local politicians say only projects already in production are exempted. INV Metals insist that granted concessions that aren't in production are also exempted. My view is that they won't get granted water or environmental permits they need and the whole thing will end up in the Ecuadorian courts. I'd be shocked if Loma Larga ever became a mine. Dundee already owned 23.5% of INV Metals before the acquisition so they clearly are taking a bet that the project will become a mine.

Adventus & Salazar Start Regional Curipamba Drilling

The drilling is done at the El Domo deposit in Curipamba. It is now advancing to a final feasability study, permitting, financing, and the like.

Now 4000m of regional exploration are budgeted in 2021 with drilling having started in late April. Can they find another VMS to extend mine life and/or size of the overall project? Well, VMSes often occur in clusters so it's quite possible.

Solgold Exploration at Cascabel

Part of Solgold's reworking of the Cascabel project is to try to find a open pittable resource so they can get some cashflow and a mill running while they develop the longer lead time underground resource. The recent drill results at Tandayama-America were intercepted at some depth and are frankly pretty low grade for underground mining, but the diagrams indicate the ore bodies may come closer to surface and if they do then they could be the open pit resource Solgold needs.

Atico Continues Expanding La Pata Footprint

More drilling on this nice VMS project outside the existing resource shell.

Drilling continues at Titan's Dynasty project

Titan found 40% more gold was extracted from the same volumes in the foreign resource estimate, where 69% more tonnes were mined versus the resource estimate, at 15% lower grade. The additional density of high-grade veining in combination with indications of low-grade aureoles around veins and vein intersections indicate bulk tonnage potential of the resource in the Cerro Verde prospect area.

The previous owners were trucking ore over 100 miles and were just sending the veins and not the surrounding low grade aureoles (halos in my terminology). I think when Titan releases a JORC resource it is going to surprise a lot of people.

Aurania Finds More Zinc

Aurania finds some really crazy high levels of zinc outcropping at surface at Tiria-Shimpia. They also found gallium and indium in the system. Two drills are now turning testing some of their many many targets across their very large amount of land.

Luminex Keeps Drilling

Luminex is currently drilling their Cascas potential porphyry target and also a gold target on their Condor property. Both of these are 100% owned properties.

Lucky Still A Company

Lucky shared the geophysics they got from their previous JV partner that pulled out. They also got assays from 16 panel & channel samples, mostly low grades.

Interesting Company Presentations

Salazar's Merlin Marr-Johnson gave a nice talk (video)

Aurania Updates Investor Presentation (pdf)

Disclosures

Of the companies mentioned in this article I have long positions in Salazar, Aurania, & Titan that were purchased in the public markets. I have not received any compensation or special access to private placements from any of the companies discussed.