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- A shipment of reject samples containing visible gold from Benz Mining’s (BNZ) Eastmain Gold drills in Quebec have arrived in Perth for analysis
- It is hoped the samples might yield higher grades than standard fire assays completed on samples last year
- Benz Mining Chief Executive Officer Xavier Braud says the company could have an underestimated resource on its hands if the samples return high grades
- Benz Mining shares were down 0.86 per cent and trading at 89 cents
A shipment of reject samples containing visible gold from Benz Mining’s (BNZ) Eastmain Gold drills in Quebec have arrived in Perth for analysis.
According to Benz, these coarse rejects are leftover material from the processing of core samples during the assaying process.
It is hoped by the company that further assaying could reveal higher grades not picked up in standard fire assays undertaken on some its samples from the project in 2020.
Benz referenced historical analysis from 2010/11 programmes in its rationale, advising that fire assays under called grades by on average 34 per cent compared with screen fire assays.
Benz Mining Chief Executive Officer Xavier Braud said it was important to use an assay method best suited to high-grade gold.
“If this round of assays shows that fire assay analytical methods have underestimated grades, then we can legitimately ask ourselves about a potential underestimation of our current resource which is based on historical fire assay
results,” he said.
“PhotonAssay will give us a much better estimation of true gold grade in our drill core as the sample method removes the bias created during the sample preparation in traditional assay methods.”
All samples are set to be assayed in a bid to capture all gold present in each sample, with the expectation that a method capturing oversized gold fractions will return more accurate assays.
Benz Mining shares were down 0.86 per cent and trading at 89 cents at 3:06 pm AEST.
