Sceptics await 11 million ounce Barkerville Gold approved NI43-101 resource statement – by Lawrence Williams (Mineweb.com – July 11, 2012)

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Barkerville Gold surprised the markets with the announcement of very large preliminary indicated gold resource assessments last week, but sceptics are awaiting official confirmation before climbing in.

LONDON (Mineweb) –  One of the surprise stories last week was the announcement by Canada’s Barkerville Gold of an enormous indicated mineral resource assessment on its principal properties in central British Columbia’s Cariboo Mining District which the company said it had to release early once the latest geological assessment was made known to the Board under Canadian stock market regulations. 

 Normally a company would wait for the full NI43-101 report to be approved by the relevant authorities and published, but the preliminary information received from the independent consultants assessing the resource represented such a huge ‘material change in conditions’ that the directors were obliged to report to shareholders as soon as they were made aware.
 
Indeed, the figures presented to the Board by the independent consultants, Geoex, assessed by well-known Canadian geologist Peter George, went a lot further than this estimated 10.63 million ounce indicated resource on the company’s Cow Mountain (also known as Gold Quartz) section. They suggested a geological potential for a massive 65-90 million ounces of gold on the 6.4 km long Island-Cow-Barkerville trend covering three adjacent mountains, all with a prior underground gold mining history.  Barkerville has been assessing mining these with large scale open pits.
 
Barkerville CEO, Frank Callaghan, has spent the past couple of days in London talking to the major resource-interested institutions.  He has also made lunchtime and evening presentations to interested investors and analysts, one of which was attended by Mineweb, on what on the face of things could be a huge gold resource of interest to major mining companies – it would almost certainly take a major to mine the resource given the huge capital costs involved nowadays in open pit operations on the kind of scale envisaged.
 
But the markets so far have proved pretty sceptical – and hereby hangs the dilemma for potential investors.  If the preliminary findings are borne out in the final approved NI43-101 report, and are also double checked by another firm of consultants – Snowden are apparently checking out the figures for Barkerville and are to conduct a pre-feasibility study – then the stock would likely surge, possibly dramatically.  However, if this initial assessment is ultimately seen as on over-optimistic assessment and  downgraded, then the stock could suffer as a result, although there is no doubt that there is indeed a considerable amount of gold on the properties.  The expressed doubts only concern the approval of the assessment methodology and size.
 
For the rest of this article, please go to the Mineweb.com website: http://www.mineweb.com/mineweb/view/mineweb/en/page103118?oid=154906&sn=Detail&pid=102055