Sacre-Coeur finds new alluvial gold zone at Million Mountain, production to start in July

Vancouver-based Sacre Coeur Minerals (CVE:SCM) said Monday it has found a new area of both alluvial and elluvial gold near its Million Mountain property in north-central Guyana.

According to the mineral explorer, the new area shows "attractive gold grades, good continuity and other favourable factors for alluvial mining", which make it ideal for the start-up of production, expected in July.

Though systemic testing of this new discovery is still ongoing, a gride of 65 test pits has yielded some encouraging results, with the number of pits grading between 0.5 to 1 gram per cubic metre (g/ cu m) totaling 19. The weighted average grade was 1.26 g/cu m, with 15 pits encountering gravity-recoverable gold grades over 1.0 g/ cu m.

The company said the contained gold particles in the new area are significantly coarser than in other alluvial deposits identified by the company to date, therefore making gold recovery by simple gravity concentration more effective.

The deposit it also situated on higher ground than other areas, making it less susceptible to flooding.

Based on test pits completed to date, Sacre Coeur said the orientation of the mineralized trend is well indicated and the trend is currently open in three directions, to be continously expanded.

“We are hopeful that on-going exploration will continue to expand this deposit and identify others with similar attributes to support the addition of  multiple, similar production units, each designed to mine and process 25,000 cubic meters of alluvial material per month," said president and CEO Greg Sparks.

"Concurrently, we will be continuing with development of processing techniques to profitably recover very fine alluvial gold which is beyond the recovery capabilities of the current system.”

Indeed, owing to the beneficial conditions of the new zone, mining will begin on this deposit once the new dredge pumping system is operational.

In March, the company began drilling targets identified last fall on the Zone 1 area of the property, which is located on the 20 kilometre Million Mountain structural trend within the company's lower Puruni Block of concessions.

The company said the targets suggest the potential to expand the preliminary Zone 1 NI 43-101 compliant resource estimate from September 2008. The 2008 report calculated measured resources of 12.12 million tonnes grading 1.0 g/t gold, and indicated resources of 2.18 million tonnes grading 0.9 g/t gold. Total contained gold was estimated at 451,397 tr ounces.