interview with neil marston ...

[Source: www.resourcesroadhouse.com.au]

Neil Marston - Horseshoe Metals
Thursday, July 26, 2012

Horseshoe Metals managing director Neil Marston called in this week on his way home from the company’s Horseshoe Lights project.



Neil, in real estate parlance, your two projects, Horseshoe Lights and Kumarina, are located in a, ‘much sought after neighbourhood’. Was that a deliberate choice?

I have actually been involved with the Horseshoe Lights project on and off for around 25 years.

I’ve know that area a long time. Over the last 15 years exploration activity slowed up in the region. However, I still considered Horseshoe to have some potential - come the right time.

The opportunity presented itself to pick it up – it was sitting with Grange Resources who I had worked with in the past. Their shift of focus to iron ore resulted in them selling off the project.

Within the portfolio Grange sold were Horseshoe Lights and Kumarina.

Of the two projects did Horseshoe Lights immediately emerge as the company’s main focus?

When we acquired the project, we had to ascertain whether it was a ready-to-mine project or not.

We conducted scoping studies before we listed the company on the ASX and we decided there was some work required to get it to the point where we could say it was ready to get back into production so that has been our primary focus since listing.

However, with Kumarina we saw it as a being an interesting area, which had not been subjected to any significant exploration.

There was the existence of the old Kumarina copper mine where old-timers had proven to be pretty good at sniffing out copper. Where they had been able to mine and produce high-grade copper we felt there was potential there for us to do the same.

What gave you that confidence in the project’s potential?

We felt by employing the right exploration techniques it could be worth having a crack at.

So before we listed we saw Horseshoe Lights as being the stable, flagship project with Kumarina being more of a blue sky opportunity.

You have announced a recent run of drilling results, what have they told you about how the project is progressing?

We’re trying to gain greater understanding of what is going on at the north end of the existing pit at Horseshoe Lights, underneath an old waste dump.

We have a specialised drill rig, called an Aardvark Rig, which is a rig that is capable of drilling horizontally.

We have been drilling shallow-angled holes under the waste dump to follow up drilling we conducted after we listed that encountered good intersections of mineralisation in what we call the Northwest Stringer Zone.

We want to test the up-dip potential of those earlier copper hits because, obviously, the shallower we can identify the mineralisation the greater the chance we have of fitting it into an enlarged open pit outline.

Why are you so focused on a waste dump?

People do wonder why the original operators put the waste dump where it is, but if you look at their actual tenement holding at the time, they had a very small parcel of gold mining leases and they were surrounded by other tenement holders so they basically had nowhere else to put it.

The dump was sited in 1985 when the mine was operating as a gold mine so they only sterilised for gold under the waste dump.

Some of the logs and geologists’ notes from the time identified the presence of copper so we want to get a good understanding of what’s going on under there, simply because it is such a shallow zone of potential mineralisation just sitting to the north of the pit.

So you’re at that stage with the drilling. Where to from here?

What we are doing is testing towards the southern end of the waste dump, trying to understand what is happening as close to the pit as possible.

We also have the Motters Zone on the eastern side of the pit, where earlier drilling has indicated a shallow copper oxide zone at surface.

So what you are looking for is an idea of where you are able to extend the existing pit?

That’s right. What we are trying to do is take our current JORC mineral resource estimation, which is 8.6 million tonnes at 1.06 per cent copper and 0.13 grams per tonne gold and fill in our block model with shallow material providing the economics to allow us to take the pit down another 50 to 60 metres into the high-grade zone that exists at the bottom of the existing pit.

We are also looking at chasing shoots of higher-grade mineralisation that could potentially be part of an underground story as well.



However, as the project is shaping up at the moment we have an oxide component that is relatively shallow at the surface. We then get down to the fresh, sulphide material in the high-grade Main Zone and we also have shoots of higher grade material at depth.

All those things are still in the mix, so we’re just drilling as much as we can in order to build the inventory up over the next few months.

That’s Horseshoe Lights, what about Kumarina?

Kumarina is interesting because the grade is such and the depth is such that it looks very encouraging. We are hitting numbers like 13 metres at 3per cent copper from just 10 metres downhole.

We have drilled around the old workings at the Rinaldi Prospect and have extended a zone of mineralisation to around 300 metres.

It appears to be steeply dipping and structurally controlled and the good thing is that there are lots of similar structures on the tenement.

Our plan is to go back and drill out Rinaldi to work up a JORC resource number there as well as test a few areas where we had some drilling success last year.

The results you have achieved so far, have they been a pleasant surprise or pretty much what you were anticipating to see?

We were following up some previous aircore drilling carried out by St Barbara at Rinaldi with RC drilling and achieved better results than they had, so we have been happy with what we have seen.



So your generally happy disposition is well justified?

I think so. The best place to find copper is near where it has been discovered in the past and geological mapping we had done earlier this year impressed the geologist who was conducting it.

I consider the potential for this particular area to be good and, despite people predicting Australia is going to run out of new ore bodies, it just confirms to me that we really have only just scratched the surface.

What would you like to be telling the market by the end of the year?

By the end of the year we should be in a position to run a JORC resource calculation on Rinaldi. At Horseshoe we should have pretty much drilled out the northern zone to the point where we can recalculate our resource numbers there as well.

We also have some targets to the west and within the southern area at Horseshoe Lights, where we are trying to locate repetitions of the Main Zone.

We are currently conducting a comprehensive geological modelling exercise on all of our drilling data and we will be doing more in-pit mapping in September.

That should lead us to doing some deep targeted drilling later in the year.

Once we have an update of the Horseshoe JORC resource, we’ll run some economic appraisals on that and if it looks alright then commence the feasibility process from there.


Ends.