Blackstone Minerals Encounters Wide Zone of Ban Chang Sulphide
THE DRILL SERGEANT: Blackstone Minerals (ASX: BSX) reported the intersection of massive sulphide from drilling at the company’s Ta Khoa nickel-PGE project in Vietnam.
Blackstone Minerals encountered massive sulphide in three maiden drill holes at the Ban Chang target that were drilled more than one kilometre apart and along strike within a 1.2km-long massive sulphide target zone that had been defined by high priority EM plates.
Of these, drillhole BC20-03 intersected a zone of 9.15m wide veins of sulphide mineralisation including 4.6m of massive sulphide (MSV) and semi massive sulphide veins (SMSV) with the broader intersection comprising:
1 metre disseminated sulphide (DSS) and sulphide veinlets from 57.05m
0.35m sulphide veinlets from 58.05m
0.3m MSV from 58.40m
2.30m DSS, 10 to 12 per cent sulphides from 58.7m
2.35m SMSV from 61m
1.85m MSV from 63.35m
0.4m sulphide veinlets from 65.2m
0.1m MSV from 65.6m
0.5m DSS and sulphide veinlets from 65.7m.
“We’re pleased to announce a significant intersection of a 9.15 metres wide zone of nickel sulphide vein mineralisation at Ban Chang which could have the scale and geometry to be mined as a bulk underground mining scenario,” Blackstone Minerals managing director Scott Williamson said in the company’s announcement to the Australian Securities Exchange.
“We’ll continue to explore Ban Chang’s potential to become a supplementary high-grade feed source to the main Ban Phuc disseminated sulphide orebody, with further holes planned for drilling in this area.”
Blackstone also has a second drill rig in operation, following its in-house geophysics crew throughout the Ta Khoa district, testing high-priority EM targets generated from 25 MSV prospects including King Snake, Ban Khoa, Ban Chang, and Ban Khang.
Blackstone is targeting MSV prospects analogous to the Ban Phuc MSV, where previous owners mined 975,000 tonnes of high-grade ore at average grades of 2.4 per cent nickel and 1 per cent copper from an average vein width of 1.3m, producing 20,700 tonnes nickel, 10100 tonnes copper and 670 tonnes cobalt.
The company’s Scoping Study on downstream processing to produce nickel sulphate for the lithium-ion battery industry and a Ban Phuc maiden resource are on track for completion in Q3, 2020.
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