HW Drill Results, page-15

Hi Jpick

A good post. You are only partly right. Wedge holes are in an of themselves more expensive by the metre because of the extra equipment and expertise required to directionally bore a hole in the direction you need it to go. However, if you have 800-900m of "barren" material before you hit the basement, where you are looking for the IOCG mineralisation, to be able to start that process at 600-700 me down the hole (recognising that you need some distance above basement to get the curve in the drill hole) you could be saving $200+K in initial drilling for a standalone hole. In my view you would not conduct a wedge hole unless you had something really interesting to look at but that could be a number of things. IOCG deposits are very complex and in order to know what you are looking at you need to understand structural controls, alteration styles, stratigraphy (where am I in the overall geological sequence), mineralogy, petrology, whole rock geochemistry. This takes time and energy and expertise. CHK could have been looking for any one or more of these components. It is not just about chasing grade (mineralisation) because that can be misleading - you have to understand the dynamics of the depositional environment.