AME BC announces 2010 award winners

Vancouver – Two B.C. prospectors, the men behind the Gibraltor mine expansion, and a well-known Vancouver financier are among those who will be lauded for their accomplishments at a gala dinner during Mineral Exploration Roundup, when the Association for Mineral Exploration British Columbia presents its 2010 award winners.

David Moore and Myron Osatenko of Serengeti Resources have won the H.H. Spud Huestis Award for excellence in prospecting and mineral exploration. Moore and Osatenko recognized that initial drill holes into Serengeti’s Kwnaika project, located in north-central B.C.’s prospective Quesnel Trough, showed alteration features characteristic of alkalic copper-gold porphyry systems. That geologic work convinced the pair to keep drilling and, soon after, they hit 111 metres grading 0.69% copper and 0.54 gram gold per tonne. Now Serengeti has delineated 183 million indicated tonnes grading 0.29% copper and 0.28 gram gold in the Central Zone plus 129 million inferred tonnes averaging 0.3% copper and 0.09 gram gold in the South Zone.

They were challenged to transform the Gibraltor mine from a swing producer into a profitable, low cost operation that could survive fluctuations in the price of copper, and they did. Now John McManus and Robert Rotzinger of Taseko Mines are being rewarded for their efforts with the E.A. Scholz Award for excellence in mine development. The open pit Gibraltor copper-molybdenum mine, 65 km northeast of Williams Lake, was built in 1975 at a milling rate of 36,750 tons per day. Taseko acquired the mine in 1999, when operations were suspended. The company reopened the mine in 2004 and immediately launched a major three-year drilling program that significantly increased reserves. Then, McManus and Rotzinger led a two-phase, five-year expansion that increased mine throughput to 55,000 tons per day. Completed in late 2010, the expansion cost $350 million and transformed Gibraltor into a stable, long-life operation.

Most everyone who has raised money for exploration in Vancouver knows Cal Everett – after all, Everett has directly raised more than $500 million for junior companies and has participated in more than $1 billion in equity financings since 2004. Now AME BC is recognizing his contribution to the industry with the Murray Pezim Award for perseverance and success in mining and exploration financing. Everett began his career as a geologist, working for majors on gold, copper-gold, molybdenum, massive sulphide, zinc-lead, and uranium projects throughout North America. In 1990 he jumped over to the financial world, embarking on a 12-year stint with BMO Nesbitt Burns focused on resource equities followed by seven years in senior resource institutional sales with PI Financial. Everett now works with Axemen Resource Capital, a firm he co-founded, and he continues to do just what Murray Pezim did: create wealth for others by providing capital to projects when others would or could not.

The Hugo Dummett Award recognizes excellence in diamond exploration and development and this year it is going to the exploration team that discovered the Renard kimberlite clusters in Quebec in 2001. Brooke Clements, Robert Lucas, and Pierre Bertrand were the key members of the Ashton Mining and SOQUEM exploration teams that vectored in to the kimberlites through five years of effort, starting with a kimberlite indicator sampling program that covered 25% of the province of Quebec. The anomalies revealed in that program led them to the three kimberlites that are now the backbone of Stornoway Diamond‘s mine plans. Renard has the potential to produce 30 million carats of diamonds over a 25-year mine life and is poised to become Quebec’s first mine. Clements is now president of Peregrine Diamonds, Lucas now works as a consulting diamond geologist, and Bertrand is now the directeur general of SOQUEM.

Moving over to Ontario, the Colin Spence Award recognizes excellence in global mineral exploration and this year it is going to David Adamson, Matthew Wunder, Ian Russell, Terry Bursey, and Crystal McCullough of Rubicon Minerals. Rubicon acquired the Phoenix project in 2002 but the team’s hunt actually began in 1996, when they recognized favorable lithologies and structural elements in the area. Mapping, extensive geochemistry, digitization of old data, and geophysical surveys helped unravel the complex geology. Once the team had a geological model, it was only a matter of time before they hit gold, and that happened on February 27, 2008, when discovery hole F2-01 returned 11 metres grading 6.8 grams gold, among other high-grade intercepts. The F2 zone now hosts 6.2 million inferred tonnes grading 20.1 grams gold, though Rubicon thinks they have only started to uncover the potential at Phoenix.

Recognizing excellence in leadership and innovation in mineral exploration health and safety, the David Barr Award is going to Harvey Tremblay. Tremblay founded Hy-Tech Drilling in Smithers, B.C., in 1991 and then grew the operation from one drill to a fleet of 25 operating throughout western Canada and Europe. He developed safe, innovative program to address B.C.’s challenging terrain and has partnered with the Northwest Community College’s Surface Diamond Driller’s Helpers program since 2005, helping to give new drillers the skills required to work safely in difficult environments. Hy-Tech’s innovations and philosophies around safety have enabled several exploration companies to have incident-free seasons.

And the Robert R. Hedley Award for excellence in social and environmental responsibility will be awarded to Ian Thomson, who realized the importance of establishing a meaningful and workable process for integrating social, environmental, and economic components in successfully developing resource projects into sustainable operations. Thomson worked with Mining, Minerals, and Sustainable Development North America in a global project to assess mining and sustainability and he was a member of the PDAC team that developed the social components of the E3 (Environmental Excellence in Exploration) best practices instrument. Thomson was also a founding member of On Common Ground Consultants, which specializes in managing social issues in resource industries.

In addition, the Past Presidents of AME BC are recognizing four people with the Frank Woodside Past Presidents Distinguished Service Award: Don Coates, the late Chuck Davis, Chris Graf, and Bill Meyer. And the Gold Pan Award, which recognizes significant contributions to the mineral exploration community through service to AME BC, is going to John Murray.