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Playfair Mining’s Copper-Silver Lining
By Claire O'Connor and James West
MidasLetter.com
Friday, April 23, 2009
Sitting in his pajamas at 4:30 in the morning, credit card in one hand, mouse in the other, Playfair Mining Ltd. (TSX.V: PLY) president Neil Briggs acquired 100% interest in 673 claims covering 16,825 of highly coveted copper-silver rich hectares in the Seal Lake area of Central Labrador. The property covers some 136 copper and copper-silver occurrences including 16 copper-silver showings and 9 copper silver prospects, all discovered mainly via prospecting in the 1950's. Armed with updated equipment, fierce ambition and a deep rooted interest in the property stemming from many moons ago, Playfair is ready to get their hands dirty. Copper-silver style.
For Starters, Tungsten
For many years Playfair had been a tungsten company, plain and simple. They accumulated a respectable number of assets, explored them and proved up the resources. Their Grey River Property reported 852,000 tonnes of 0.86% tungsten. The Risby property reported 8,537,000 tonnes of 0.48% tungsten. The only thing missing was actual outside interest. With tungsten prices at a discouraging low, Playfair decided it was time for a change. However, since the decision was made to put the tungsten projects on the back burner, demand for the metal has started to rise once again.
As a result, the company is not planning on selling its Tungsten assets anytime soon. Make no bones about it, they’re holding onto those tungsten gems. China has just recently become the world’s largest tungsten consumer and although the economic giants provide 85% of the world’s primary tungsten, they’ve now begun importing it too.
Tungsten has a wide range of uses, the largest of which is as tungsten carbide, a wear-resistant material used by the metalworking, mining, petroleum, military construction and jewelry industries. It’s also widely used in light bulb and vacuum tube filaments, as well as electrodes, as it can be drawn into very thin metal wires that have a high melting point, similar to the temperature of the sun. With so many significant functions, it’s no surprise that general demand for tungsten is rising again, indicating prosperity for tungsten resource companies in the near future.
Credit for the Seal Lake brainwave can be bestowed upon Neil Briggs:
“I’ve known about this property since about 1970. I’ve had a sample of rock from this project since 1970. One of the guys who worked here in the 50’s ended up running an exploration office for Falconbridge Nickel Mines in Quebec and later on I ended up running that same office in 1970. I saw the rock and read his reports on the property, so I kind of had Seal Lake in my head when we were looking around for something.”
How Playfair Won The Toss
Briggs was researching a rare earth property in the Labrador area on the government website when he came across a large concentration of mineral occurrences nearby. Upon further inspection he discovered it was good old Seal Lake and realized the claims would all be coming
available for staking by January of this year, as a result of the collapse of the uranium rush and of course, the recession.
Armed with a trusty credit card and a fervent desire to make Seal Lake theirs, Briggs and a colleague staked the entire area in 7 minutes:
“You go online to do the staking in Newfoundland, no more going out in the bush and pounding stakes in the ground, you stake it all on the internet. So we figured out the quickest way to do it because when you do it on the internet, it’s who can outline the area and enter your credit card details quickest that gets it. We practiced how to do it quickly. Then we got up early in the morning and went in, at 1 second after 9 o’clock Newfoundland time, and we started staking it. We got the whole thing done in 7 minutes.”
Happy with their newly acquired properties but unsure yet whether they’d had any competition that morning, Briggs soon found out. The Round Up Mining Conference in Vancouver a few weeks later brought him into contact with an associate who was based in Toronto. When the conversation steered towards Playfairs acquirement of Seal Lake the associate told Briggs in no uncertain terms how poorly he thought of him for nabbing the property ahead of him.
“We were just quicker than him.” Briggs laughed, “So that was good.”
The Story of Seal Lake
As Briggs indicated, Seal Lake has quite a history. The Seal Lake Basin has been explored intermittently for copper since 1950 by a number of senior companies, including Frobisher, Kenneco (a Kennecott subsidiary), Brinex, Beth-Canada (a subsidiary of Bethlehem Steel) and Noranda Exploration.
Mineralization at Seal Lake has been recognized since the 1970's as a reduced facies sediment-hosted copper-silver mineralization of Kuperschiefer-type. Europe's Kupferschiefer (medieval miners term for "copper shale") Basin is host to one of the biggest sediment-hosted copper districts of the world, second only to the Central African Copperbelt. The Seal Lake Basin is most closely analogous to the White Pine deposit in Michigan, USA that is reported by the USGS to contain 688 million tonnes grading 1.2% copper and 40 gpt silver.
“We’re comparing it geologically to White Pine in Michigan”, said Briggs. “All the surrounding rocks compare most closely to that property. There was an academic paper published in 1975 which makes that comparison (“Cupriferous Shales of the Adeline Island Formation, Seal Lake Group, Labrador” by S.S. Gandhi and A.C. Brown). So these are big deposits. These are historical numbers from the property.”
Playfair really landed on their feet regarding reconnaissance work on the property. They were lucky enough to be able to access reports, maps and airborne surveys from the 50’s and 70’s online, as well as chip sample results reported by Noranda in 1991.
The Noranda report showed that "Mineralization in the area of interest consists of disseminated chalcocite with lesser bornite and chalcopyrite in grey-green reduced shales. The Whiskey Lake No. 150 showing had the best results. This was 2.94% Cu and 45.85 g/t Ag over 11.0 m which includes 5.1% Cu and 72.67g/t Ag over 4.0m".
Doing Things Differently
Playfair hopes to capitalize on what previous exploration missed by using a completely different approach than their Seal Lake predecessors did. Aside from the fact that, unlike Seal Lake’s most recent proprietors, Playfair will not be exploring for uranium; they will also be searching for a completely different type of deposit than that which interested their exploration ancestors.
“They looked for something high grade and small, and we would look for something bigger and lower grade so we’d be looking at it with different eyes I guess.” Briggs commented, “Sometimes they only recovered 30% of the core they were drilling through, they just ground the rest up. But equipment is better now so you’d get it all, you don’t know what was in that 70% that you just didn’t see. So there are things like that that we’d be doing.”
A press release issued April 19th confirms Briggs’ suspicions that many of the historical mineralized zones have been significantly understated and undervalued in the data compiled in the 50’s.
According to the press release:
“This re-examination of historical documents is Playfair’s first meaningful step towards understanding the extensively mineralized copper-silver sedimentary basin system at Seal Lake and will be a big part of the foundation of this season’s planned drill program.”
Past explorationists, working at a time of very low copper prices (est. $0.35 per pound in the 1950’s) and with very limited local infrastructure, were obliged to consider only very high grade mineralized zones as potentially economic. Favourable current circumstances provide Playfair the timely opportunity to greatly expand and develop known copper-silver mineralization to include zones which were previously undervalued. As a result, many historical drill intercepts and trench lengths can be expanded significantly by incorporating past underrated copper-silver zones. For example, in 1956 Kennco Explorations Ltd. reported a highlight composite rock trench result at the Ellis Prospect as 3.66 metres of 2.58% copper and 84.0 gpt silver, however Playfair’s review of the data shows the zone is much more robust at 9.75 metre, grading 1.35% copper and 43.9 gpt silver.”
Donald G. Moore. Playfair’s Chairman states:
“As we dig deeper into the Seal Lake historical data we are continually impressed by the region’s untapped copper-silver potential. The positive re-evaluation of many historical prospects re-enforces Playfair’s conviction that the basin hosts sizeable Kuperschiefer style Cu-Ag mineralization. The technical, logistical and economic challenges which hindered our predecessors are less of a factor today. We look forward to the opportunity to drill test a good many priority targets this year.”
Indeed the Seal Lake of 2010 differs greatly from that of the 50’s. With the inevitable and significant developments in equipment, copper prices and the infrastructure of the area, it’s a whole different ball game. Now, with copper trading at much higher prices (Up to $3.50 from $0.35 in the mid 50’s), the Trans-Labrador Highway 110 km to the south and the Churchill Falls Hydro dam 180 km to the southwest, Seal Lake can be viewed as a large, target-rich area with potentially economically significant mineralization.
Playfair is firing on all cylinders. They have the historical reports, maps and surveys to prove the resource is there. The property is situated in the mining friendly district of Central Labrador.They know that Seal Lake is geologically similar to the mineral rich White Pine deposit in Michigan, and copper prices are soaring as demand is rising for the metal used in pipes and wires. All they need to do now is get to work on the property, and that’s what they intend to do.
“In this area (a long 33km by 4.4km mineralized zone, believed to be canoe shaped) there are something like 260 copper occurrence”, says Briggs,. “That’s a significant number. Of that 260, 10% of them, are bigger or better, so we’re concentrating on those 26 initially. And right now I’m just working on 2 of them, and digging into these reports from the 50s.”
Playfair Plan of Action
Playfair plans to commence drilling this summer and hope to drill about 20 holes in the vicinity of the known historical occurrences. Luckily, Seal Lake is an area that accommodates drilling and exploration just as well in the winter as in the summer, if not better.
“This is a place where you can drill year round,” says Briggs, “In a way it’s probably easier in the winter because you can get around. It gets cold there but that’s good, because then you’ve got ice so you can get around on the lakes and on the swamps and do a lot of the work in the winter, and probably do it cheaper and easier then too. Our plan would be to start initially in the summer, then put that together and go on into next winter.”
The Seal Lake story is one of many chapters. Beginning in the 50’s and now, back for another shot at greatness with Playfair in 2010, this is a property made of stronger stuff than most. Follow Playfairs progress at www.playfairmining.com to see how the next chapter unravels.
DISCLOSURE: A fee has been paid for the production and distribution of this article and as such should be viewed in the context of advertising.
SOURCE: http://www.midasletter.com/news/100423_Play-minings-silver-copper-lining.php
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