Goldsource Mines has revealed the NI 43-101 compliant, initial thermal coal resource estimated by Moose Mountain Technical Services for the company's border property near Hudson Bay, Saskatchewan, Canada.
This coal resource estimation is based on 119 diamond drill holes totaling approximately 17,370metres of core drilling. Since 2008, three phases of core drilling have been completed at border to establish the initial estimated coal resource.
The estimated coal resources at border consist of 63.5 million Indicated tonnes, 89.6 million Inferred tonnes, and 18.7 million Speculative tonnes. The Inferred and Speculative resources are limited only by the current lack of drill hole data within an already defined geophysical anomaly.
Further drilling is planned that may convert the majority of the Inferred and Speculative tonnes into the Indicated Resource category. As defined in Geological Survey of Canada(GSC) Paper 88-21, “Speculative resources are those based on extrapolation of few data points over large distances and are confined to regions where extensive coal exploration has not yet taken place”.
Geological interpretation of the drill core and downhole geophysical logs have determined that there are three main seams at border which have been designated Durango A, B and C. The Geologic-type as defined by GSC Paper 88-21 with respect to the complexity of the deposits is considered moderate and the Deposit-type is considered surface mineable.
The resources are distributed over four sub-basins which include 14 potentially surface mineable deposits which range in size from 1.8 million tonnes to 66.1 million tonnes. The fifteenth deposit, Pasquia 97, is currently considered too deep to be surface mineable and is not included in the resource.
J. Scott Drever, president of Goldsource, said: “Our objective from the efforts to date was to define a coal resource we thought would be a threshold amount with sufficient quality to support economically viable production. In approximately 18 months from the discovery of these unique coal deposits, we have outlined a significant coal resource that has the heating characteristics and potential to fuel a major, modern, clean-coal power plant.
“We will continue to define additional coal resources by drilling several more high priority targets at border and now proceed with the completion of a Preliminary Economic Assessment on the project that will investigate initial economic parameters of the border resource. We have explored only a small portion of more than 1,300sq.km property with 119 drill holes.”
This initial coal resource with estimated coal quality represents a new energy resource for Saskatchewan and Canada. Conceptually, this resource could generate 300 to 600MW per year of affordable electricity for 30 to 50 years. This would be equivalent to approximately 10 to 20% of the current annual electricity needs for Saskatchewan.