Starfield sets sights on high-grade zone

Vancouver — Armed with $1.6 million, Starfield Resources (SRU-V) is preparing to explore the newly discovered high-grade zone on the Ferguson Lake copper-nickel-platinum-palladium project in Nunavut.

The junior added $157,000 to its coffers by selling 313,750 flow-through units priced at 50 each to Mtax Mineral Limited partnership. A unit consists of one flow-through share and one warrant, which is exercisable into a share at 55 for 18 months. Starfield added $1.5 million through a private placement of 3 million units priced at 50 each. Each of these units consists of one share and one warrant exercisable at 75 for one year.

The funds will be used to follow up last year’s discovery of a high-grade platinum-palladium zone.

Hole 101 cut a 0.35-metre-thick zone, 15 metres above the massive sulphides, yielding 103 grams palladium and 26.7 grams platinum per tonne at a down-hole depth of 962.3 metres. Subsequent check assays revealed that the interval also contained 2.74 grams rhodium per tonne. (Rhodium is a platinum group metal fetching US$750 per oz.; by comparison, platinum and palladium recently traded at US$486 and US$444 per oz., respectively.)

Drill hole 104 was collared 500 metres east of hole 101, returning 1.24% copper, 0.94% nickel, 0.09% cobalt, 2.27 grams palladium and 0.3 gram platinum over 8.8 metres from 843.6 metres down-hole. A little more than 101 metres below this intercept, the low-sulphide zone was encountered; it yielded 9.9 grams palladium and 1.44 grams platinum over 0.5 metre.

The new zone is believed to be a separate, subparallel horizon within the overall gabbroic host sill. It may represent a distinct mineralizing event caused by primary differentiation during cooling of the original sill.

Last year’s drilling focused on the West zone, which hosts the bulk of the inferred resource at Ferguson Lake (51.7 million tonnes grading 0.92% copper, 0.58% nickel and 1.44 grams combined platinum and palladium at a cutoff grade of 1% combined copper and nickel).

Copper mineralization at the West zone was initially discovered in the 1950s by Inco and followed up three decades later by a unit of Homestake Mining. The former estimated that the West zone had a resource of 6.4 million tonnes grading 0.87% copper and 0.75% nickel, whereas the latter discovered showings of platinum, palladium and cobalt mineralization in sulphide-bearing outcrops.

Manual resource estimates for the East I zone indicate 2.9 million tonnes grading 1% copper, 0.8% nickel and 1.2 grams combined platinum-palladium. The East II zone amounts to 1.3 million tonnes grading 0.9% copper, 0.8% nickel and 1.2 grams combined platinum-palladium.

Starfield earned a 100% interest in the 200-sq.-km property by paying $75,000 in cash, issuing 4.25 million shares and spending $1.7 million on exploration.