Northern Miner
Nicholas Mather, president and CEO of Australian junior SolGold, is The Northern Miner’s Mining Person of the Year for 2018 in recognition of his role as the driving force behind the wildly successful grassroots team that has drilled off the world-class Alpala gold-copper deposit at its Cascabel project in Imbabura province in northern Ecuador, with potentially many more discoveries to come in the region.
The past year was a pivotal one for Toronto- and London-listed SolGold. In November 2018, it tabled an updated resource for Alpala that tallied a staggering 2.1 billion indicated tonnes grading 0.41% copper and 0.29 gram gold per tonne, or 0.60% copper equivalent (at a 0.2% copper-equivalent cut-off), plus another 900 million inferred tonnes grading 0.27% copper and 0.13 gram gold, or 0.35% copper equivalent, at the same cut-off. These numbers are based on 133,600 metres of drilling.
That translates to a contained metal content of 8.4 million tonnes copper and 19.4 million oz. gold in the indicated category, and another 2.5 million tonnes copper and 3.8 million oz. gold in inferred.
SolGold notes that Alpala has returned “some of the greatest drill hole intercepts in porphyry copper-gold exploration history,” as seen in hole 12 (CSD-16-12) returning 1,560 metres grading 0.59% copper and 0.54 gram gold per tonne, including 1,044 metres of 0.74% copper and 0.54 gram gold.
Originally formed in 2006 and involved in a high-grade gold discovery in the Solomon Islands, SolGold took its present name in 2012 and signed a fateful agreement with TSX Venture Exchange-listed Cornerstone Capital for the Alpala copper-gold project in northern Ecuador. SolGold has since boosted its stake to 85%, and this year launched a hostile offer to buy Cornerstone and consolidate ownership of the project.
For the rest of this article: https://www.northernminer.com/news/solgolds-nick-mather-our-mining-person-of-the-year-for-2018/1003804362/