Two Toronto-listed companies — Battle Mountain Gold and TVX Gold — have formed a joint venture to develop the latter’s Volta Grande gold property in Brazil’s Para state.
The property consists of 15,100 hectares of land in the Palmeiras greenstone belt, 460 km south of the city of Belem. Gold occurrences in the area associated with intense tectonic-hydrothermal activity have been studied and developed by various mining companies from the 1950s to the present.
Preliminary exploration by TVX outlined three major drill targets. These were defined by soil geochemical, auger and channel sampling, and by initial drilling. Channel sampling in saprolite resulted in gold values of up to 100 metres grading 0.53 gram per tonne and 24 metres grading 1.47 grams. Internal shear veins in the same trend indicate high gold grades suitable for underground mining, in particular 1-3 metres grading 12 grams gold or more.
Three exploratory holes drilled in a tonalite sequence hit 0.65 metre grading 13.45 grams gold, 1.14 metres of 7.99 grams and 2.5 metres of 1.46 grams.
As part of the 1996 program, the joint venture will continue with auger drilling on the open-pit targets (saprolite) and with a diamond drill program of 3,800 metres to define the open-pit and underground targets.
The deal will see Battle Mountain acquire a 50% equity interest in the property for US$890,000 and spend US$3.5 million up to June 1, 1998.
Meanwhile, TVX has announced that its net earnings for the quarter ended March 31 were US$6.3 million, or 4 cents per share, up from US$5.6 million, or 3 cents per share, a year earlier. Gold production was 101,500 oz., while silver production was 1.131 million oz., compared with 85,900 oz. and 1.36 million oz., respectively, in the first quarter of 1995.
Cash costs increased to US$230 from US$225 in the same period last year, principally because of increased costs at the company’s Casa Berardi and Mineral Hill mines.
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