Getting in Early: Pebble Creek Mining

Pebble Creek Mining (PEB-V) of Vancouver is banking on becoming the first foreign company and the first private-sector company to start up a new precious and base metals mine in India in more than fifty years.

“If all goes reasonably well, we expect to complete a prefeasibility study within ten months from now, a bankable feasibility study four months later, spend one year on underground development and mill construction, and be in production in late 2009,” says Andrew Nevin, Pebble Creek’s president and CEO.

Pebble Creek’s main project is Askot — a high grade copper and zinc deposit with silver, gold and lead. The deposit is nestled in the low foothills of the Himalayas in northern India’s Uttarakhand state, a forested region just a few kilometres west of the Kali River, which forms the international border with Nepal.

Pebble Creek has a prospecting licence on the property and filed for a 30-year mining lease in March 2005.

So far what is known is that Askot has an average thickness of 4.5 metres and a known strike length of 600 metres. It is a volcanogenic massive sulfide deposit, 1,000 of which occur around the world and supply much of the globe’s needs for metals. “We have walked around inside our underground drift,” Nevin says, “and in forty-two years as an exploration geologist I have never seen such a high-grade but not-yet-mined mineral deposit.”

The United Nations Development Program, the Geological Survey of India and four other government agencies intermittently explored Askot between 1965 and 1988. Their work included 9,000 metres of drilling in 51 holes, 1,000 metres of exploratory underground workings at three levels and metallurgical bench tests. (None of the government-owned mining companies had enough money or interest to develop it, and laws at the time prevented foreign or private-sector companies to explore or mine these metals.)

Drilling started in July to confirm some of the 51 holes previously drilled by government agencies and Pebble Creek expects to establish a NI 43-101 compliant resource estimate before the end of the year.

A second project is at Gadarwara, 140 km southeast of the city of Bhopal in the central Indian state of Madhya Pradesh. Gadarwara is a huge 50 sq. km magnetic anomaly that might derive from an iron-oxide copper gold target or a nickel-copper-platinum deposit. Nevin says the cause of the anomaly is unknown but it is similar in size, magnitude and geologic setting to the discovery anomaly over the Olympic Dam copper gold deposit in southern Australia, which produces about 9 million tonnes per annum. It took Pebble Creek eight years to get its reconnaissance permit on the Gadarwara property and drilling is forecast to start in September.

Pebble Creek’s third interest is in diamond exploration at Banda, 30 km northeast of Panna district in the state of Uttar Pradesh [CK]. The company says that the kimberlite pipes near Panna constitute the only diamond mining district in India that has been mined systematically in recent years by a state-owned company, National Mineral Development Corporation.

West of Panna, 15 kimberlite pipes have been discovered recently by Rio Tinto (RTP-N, RIO-L). East of Panna and south of Banda, diamonds have been found and mined from a “fossil” placer deposit in Proterozoic conglomerate, known as the Vindhyan formation. For many years it was assumed that the Vindhyan diamonds were derived from the bedrock pipes of Panna but that assumption is being challenged by scientific work by the Geological Survey of India.

Last year under a deal with De Beers, Pebble Creek gave it the right to earn 85% of the equity in Banda through a jointly held company in return for conducting all exploration through a feasibility study.