North Bay Resources Inc. (OTC:NBRI) CEO Jared Lazerson talked with Proactive about a major development at the company's Fran Project. Lazerson discussed the identification of a potentially large, disseminated gold deposit that could contain an estimated 2 million ounces of gold.
Proactive: All right, welcome back inside our Proactive newsroom. And joining me now is Jared Lazerson, he is the CEO of North Bay Resources. Jared, it's always great to see you. How are you?
Jared Lazerson: Doing great. How about yourself?
Doing well, thanks very much. Interesting news release out of the company today, talking about the company identifying what they say is a major gold deposit at the Fran Project. So, take me through some of the process in getting to this particular point. I know you looked at a lot of historical data that you had.
That's correct. We're active at Fran. There’s been some stockpile ore that we’ve been shipping to our Bishop Gold Mill. As that mill ramps up, the historical focus at Fran has been on high-grade gold veins — there are mid to high-grade veins, up to five of them in certain areas, in parallel lanes.
That’s been the focus going back probably to 2007. That second drill program was targeted at these veins, which had begun to be delineated in 2006. There was talk in 2006, looking at old reports, of mass tonnage disseminated gold, but it wasn’t followed up. Their focus really remained on these mid to high-grade veins.
We had pursued that. There’s also a high-grade oxide zone near surface, which has really been our focus in terms of feedstock for our mill. There’s potentially a decade or more of feedstock for the 100 tonne per day mill that we are currently ramping up and have begun doing refinery shipments for.
Back to the gold deposit — it’s really a recombination of historical data. We were going through it over the last couple of weeks as we began to put together our development plan for the mine, beyond just the surface deposit. Not just the easy-to-access high or mid-grade ore, but looking at the deposit as a whole. We began to see something very interesting when we put the drill data together.
There are — and this is definitive — over 55,000 feet of drilling, or 18,000 metres, across 104 holes. That’s a lot of hard data. We began to see sections around 100 metres thick — around 350 feet — of low-grade ore. The compelling part about this is the scale we’re looking at.
We are essentially next to Mount Milligan, which is 300 million tonnes, and not far from Blackwater, which I believe just commenced operations in January. Blackwater is 350 million tonnes and grading 0.8 grams per tonne — and we’re coming in right around the same at 0.8 grams. Mount Milligan is similar, a little lower on gold at about 0.45g/t, but they have copper which brings them up to 0.67g/t. So we are in the neighbourhood, and right next to a mass tonnage deposit.
Jared, you’ve got it here spanning about 1000 metres by 100 metres by 300 metres. Right? This is a fairly sizable chunk you're talking about.
Yeah. That’s kind of where we’re heading. Where we are right now is continuing to go through the data. We're reviewing 104 holes. We've gone through a good number and scanned for the obvious. We're putting the model together now and will ship it off for a formal resource estimate.
We certainly have sufficient data for that. We were planning on doing it anyway, but now we’ll do it differently, looking at mass tonnage targets. As of today, we’ve identified a zone of 1000m by 100m and 300m deep. Some holes are significantly wider than that, just by triangulation.
The zone is open at depth and along strike, particularly to the east. Interestingly, that’s where they started drilling and exploring because the high-grade gold veins died out — but the disseminated gold actually appears to increase to the east. Definitively, the copper grades increase to the east too, which is very interesting when comparing with Mount Milligan.
So the long and the short of it — where we stand today — 1000m by 100m by 300m deep, specific gravity of 2.65 (granite/limestone), puts us at 79.5 million tonnes at 0.8 grams per tonne. Ballpark, that’s 2 million ounces — with some significant areas for expansion.
One of the nearby comps, Blackwater, was at 10 million ounces — I believe they’re now at 11 million. So, yeah, very interesting. And we're moving this to a resource estimate.
And so that’s the next stage, obviously. Just really quickly in the news release as we wrap up — you talked about a shifting strategy. You'll continue to look at the processing for the Bishop Mill and then continue to follow this gold. So that's really the focus now going forward?
Yeah. We were really focused on development as a small to mid-high grade deposit — surface, and eventually underground development. We’ll shift that. Drop the underground development, mine the surface, and develop the high to mid-grade surface material for mill shipment.
Then really evaluate, at this phase — this is all very new — the very large, potentially world-class, mass tonnage deposit, and make some decisions around that at a later date.
Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and style