Aftermath Silver Ltd (TSX-V:AAG, OTCQX:AAGFF) CEO Ralph Rushton joined Proactive to discuss recent drill results from its at its flagship Berenguela silver-copper-manganese deposit in southern Peru.
The latest results come from 16 additional drill holes, forming part of the 82-hole, 5,200-metre program targeting resource expansion and definition in a highly prospective area of the deposit.
Proactive: All right, welcome back inside our Proactive newsroom. And joining me now is Ralph Rushton. He is the CEO of Aftermath Silver. And Ralph, great to see you again. How are you?
Ralph Rushton: I'm very good. Thanks. How are you?
I'm doing well. So the company out reporting some drill results. Maybe you can talk a little bit about the project itself and more importantly, where these drill results are from.
Yeah. So we did a modest campaign of drilling last year with about 60 or 70 holes. It sounds a lot, but the holes are fairly short. The latest batch of holes were from two different zones, one on the eastern side of the resource and one on the central side. They're testing the northern limits of the resource as it stands.
So both of them are converting inferred resources into a higher confidence category, measured and indicated. And they're also testing the northern margins of the resource to see if there's any more mineralization beyond where we currently know it.
And these were 16 additional holes. So are you happy with what you're seeing so far in continuation of these?
Absolutely. Particularly in the central holes, we are seeing some very nice silver grades coming back from those. We have another 11 holes pending, and that'll be the last batch of holes for this particular round of drilling. We hope to have those out fairly soon. Then all that information is going to be fed into a big spreadsheet.
From that will come a new resource estimate sometime in the next couple of months. The qualified person was on site last week, so that has been taken care of and they've reviewed the core. So we can now move to completion of the revised resource estimate.
Are you happy that you're seeing these types of results at such a low depth? I mean, we're talking up to about 60 meters downhole. So obviously that's a positive when you're looking at a project.
Yeah. We've always known that the mineralization in this project is close to surface. So it makes the potential mining scenario very straightforward. It's a potential open pit operation, with mineralization starting at surface in some areas of the project. So basically, your mining machine would be straight onto mineralized rock. We wouldn't have to strip off any waste.
Now, obviously that needs to be confirmed by an engineering study, but that's the way it looks at the moment.
And lastly, what will you do following these results? You mentioned you're obviously preparing that report, which will be a key report to come out. Are you looking at potentially doing more work in the summer or what's the plan?
We have sufficient drilling now to move into completion of a preliminary economic analysis. Potentially, we have enough drilling to complete a pre-feasibility study. We don't believe we need much more — maybe a little bit of geotechnical drilling to assess the quality of the rock. But this is all feeding into the engineering study, which is underway.
The engineers are in Reno and in Peru. They're looking at a potential mine model, logistics, infrastructure, power, mining rates — all that kind of stuff is being fed into the engineering study. From that, we hope to get an initial idea of the potential economic to the project sometime in the next probably 6 to 12 months.
Quotes have been lightly edited for clarity and style