Vancouver – After years of focusing on bits and pieces of various styles of gold and copper mineralization on its Batoto gold project in the Philippines, Vancouver-based Sur American Gold (SUR-V) is anxious to put the puzzle together and define what may prove to be a large porphyry system.
While checking out a 600-by-800-metre induced polarization (IP) anomaly, the company discovered a 1,000-metre-wide altered quartz diorite with quartz veining and oxidized iron and copper sulphides. Some 200 metres from the initial discovery, at Batoto Creek, crews collected a 17-tonne bulk sample from a 176-metre channel sample into a fresh gold-rich copper porphyry mineralized zone.
The company is processing the samples and assaying them for copper and gold to get a better handle on the average grade. So far, random sampling has yielded an average grade of more than 2 grams gold per tonne from 44 metres of the trench.
Sur American believes that Batoto’s copper grades could increase with depth while gold grades could decrease, based on other Mindanao porphyry copper deposits.
The company has decided to move towards defining the over-all size and grade of the Batoto gold and copper system over the 6.4-sq. km area, rather than trying to define smaller high grade resources in each zone.
This will entail spacing the drill holes 120-240 metres apart in the Clark area, expanding south towards the Tarale zone and west toward Santa Fe. The company plans to drill deeper holes to intersect the mineralization which it projects at between 100-350-metre depths.
At Santa Fe, the mineralization could occur at depths of up to 1,000 metres. Sur American plans to run another IP survey and obtain another drill capable of reaching these depths for Santa Fe.
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