TSX Venture rises, Dec. 23-27: Aurania, New Pacific, Advance Gold, Hannan

The S&P/TSX Venture Composite Index climbed 2.69% to 563.58 and spot gold rose to US$1,510.80 per oz. — a US$32.40 per oz. (2.19%) gain.

Shares of Aurania Resources were up 69¢ to $4.24. The company recently hired Gregor Borg, an independent specialist and expert on sedimentary-hosted copper deposits to assess its Lost Cities–Cutucu project in Ecuador. The professor “observed that in his wide-ranging and worldwide personal experience he has never before come across spatially coincident porphyry copper and sedimentary-hosted copper as seen across the project area,” Aurania reported on Dec. 23. “This potentially geologically unique situation has come about due to intrusion of the porphyries into chemically receptive red beds and black shales.” The project is located in the Jurassic metallogenic belt in the eastern foothills of the Andes mountain range of southeastern Ecuador.

New Pacific Metals’ shares climbed 55¢ to $5.44. The company expanded its Silver Sand land package by acquiring from private owners a 100% stake in a special temporary authorization 4 km north of the Silver Sands discovery, for a one-time, US$200,000 cash payment. The company reported that the new property is made up of outcropping, strongly altered Miocene dacitic intrusions, which are cut by numerous northwest-striking, silver-mineralized structures similar to the ones that host mineralization on its Silver Sand project.

Shares of Advance Gold jumped 106% to 17¢. The company reported that the first hole drilled into a large chargeability anomaly at its Tabasquena project in Mexico’s Zacatecas state found a 78-metre sulphide zone with disseminated to massive sulphides associated with quartz from 226 to 304 metres downhole. At the bottom of the hole (from 405 to 415 metres), the drill hit a second 10-metre  zone of quartz veins, with disseminated sulphides in the andesites surrounding the veins. Samples from both zones have been submitted for assays. Two phases of 3-D induced polarization geophysical surveys identified a 500- by 1,000-metre continuous chargeability anomaly. Tabaquena is near the Milagros silver mine, which is close to the city of Ojo Caliente.

Hannan Metals rose 69.2% to 22¢. The company said it will issue up to 1.5 million common shares in a private placement at 10¢ per share for gross proceeds of up to $150,000. The funds will be used for exploration at its properties in Peru. In mid-December, Hannan Metals doubled its land holding to 60 km on its Sacanche mining concession. The new mining concession area covers another 30 km along strike from the same prospective host rocks the company found at Sacanche, and are along strike from copper-silver mineralization at a new outcrop that assays up to 2 metres of 5.9% copper and 66 grams silver per tonne.