Ann: BOSS ADOPTS NEW EXPLORATION STRATEGY - ENTER, page-2

re: Ann: BOSS ADOPTS NEW EXPLORATION STRATEGY... Interesting interview with Peter Williams today - should be interesting times for boss holders

European game plan to drive Boss
Tuesday, 3 September 2013

DITCHING west Africa in favour of mineral-rich projects in Scandinavia, Boss Resources is on a mission to apply advanced technologies in under-explored regions in the hope of finding big, high-grade deposits.
The company has turned its back on Burkina Faso for now due to the recent decline in market sentiment towards gold and gold exploration in the country.
While it will retain its assets in Burkina for when gold stages a comeback, Boss has already begun the transition to nickel-copper-focused explorer and has made the foray into Europe.
With a change in commodity, geography and risk profile, the company hopes its new exploration strategy will return rewards in both the near and long term.
Spearheading the strategy of moving in on exploration ground others have abandoned is former Western Mining Corporation chief of geophysics Peter Williams. While Williams holds shares in Boss, he says he is very keen to be part of the company’s European game plan.
Speaking to MiningNewsPremium.net soon after announcing its plans to embark on the new exploration strategy, Williams said a move into Europe as opposed to Australia or South America was a simple decision.
“By moving into Europe we’re moving into those countries that are prospective, stable and friendly to mining,” he said.
“Previously they [Europe] had an attitude of ‘not in our backyard’ in regard to mining.
“But with the Chinese moving into Africa and grabbing resources like there’s no tomorrow, the Europeans have suddenly said, well wait a minute we may be getting left out,” he said.
In addition, both Finland and Sweden are in close proximity to smelters while established infrastructure may rival that of Australia’s.
“It’s a completely different game to Africa where you have to put the roads and rail in,” he said.
At the core of Boss’s re-jigged exploration strategy is its plan to utilise low-cost modern detection geophysical technologies for rapid project evaluation.
The technologies are similar in nature to those instrumental in company-making finds, including Sirius Resources Nova discovery and Sandfire Resources Degrussa find.
“What we are doing is looking for ore types that are either directly detectable by using one geophysical technique, or a combination of geophysics techniques where their critical controlling factors are mappable by geophysics,” Williams said.
Williams said this was important because it was much easier and cheaper to get on the ground and do geophysical surveys.
“With Sirius for example, they detected how large the ore system was very quickly using electromagnetics, so they could get a much quicker appreciation of the share price than what’s traditionally done,” he said.
“In effect one could see the ore system using geophysics directly.”
The company plans to initially do electromagnetics over two prospects prospective for nickel and copper, with a capital expenditure of $50-$80,000 per prospect.
Williams said the low-cost strategy the company was employing was key in an environment such as this.
“You want to keep your admin and general non-inground costs down and you want to focus as quickly as possible on the high value discovery proposition,” he said.
“The worst thing you can do is drill something where you get an intercept, but it’s so small that it doesn’t make a difference but you end up spending a lot of money to prove up something that’s never going to make it.”
Boss’s entry into Europe comes down to agreements it has inked to acquire a 100% interest in the Liakka project in Finland and the Skogtrask property in Sweden,l which are currently owned by the Newgenco Group and are both prospective for copper and nickel.
Newgenco, which has been active in Scandinavia since 2008, specialises in magmatic nickel, copper and PGE sulphide ore bodies.
Under terms of the acquisition, Boss must spend a minimum of $A80,000 per project in the first year to secure an 80% stake.
If Boss proceeds to mine, the company will acquire the remaining 20% stake from Newgenco at an independently assessed valuation.
Geophysical exploration and 22 diamond drill holes in the Liakka intrusion were completed by Outokumpu in 1982-86 and confirmed the presence of nickel-copper sulphides. No work has been undertaken since.
Over at Skogtrask, Newgenco undertook exploration during 2008-2011, but no modern high-powered EM technologies have been employed on the property.
Williams said the important aspect of the agreement was there were no big upfront costs, with the company only having to fork out about $20,000 to enter the joint venture.
“It’s not a great spend and it’s money that goes straight into the ground,” he said.
“Our task is to evaluate them quickly and effectively and if they [projects] do not scrub up, then we’ll move on.”
Williams said the projects would have to prove to be high-grade if the company was to stick around.
“For both those projects we’re looking at thicker mineralisation and also high grade nickel and copper,” he said.
As a rule of thumb, the higher the sulphide content in these systems, the higher the metal grade and the higher the conductivity/conductance (which is what is mapped with electromagnetics).
Also the more continuous the conductive sulphide, the better quality of the ore system and this in turn is easier to detect using electromagnetics.
“This is the same philosophy that we followed in the Long-Victor mine when I was with the Independence Group,” he said.
While the company knows it is dealing with a mineralised system, Williams said the unknown was size.
“We don’t want to spend $50 million and end up with a 100 million tonne deposit, that’s just not interesting,” he said.
“You’ve got to be spending $10 million and finding and delineating a $1 billion deposit.”
“That’s the game we’ve got to play and we have to stick to it.”
What really excited Boss was the fact that the projects sat in the highly prospective Fennoscandian Shield, often dubbed the forgotten belt because of the lack of follow-up exploration.
Historic exploration in the region has predominately been dominated by the semi-government organisation known as Outokumpu.
While this resulted in the discovery of many new mineral prospects, such exploration lacked the economic evaluation methodologies that focus appropriate development investment in private sector organisations due in part to a lack of government funding.
“The exploration just hasn’t been done in the past 30-40 years in Europe, so they’ve missed out on all these new techniques that we’ve developed in Australia,” he said.
As well as providing Boss with upside opportunities for potential company-changing discoveries, Williams said the shield hosted all sorts of mineral deposits, including nickel, copper, iron, titanium, niobium, uranium and gold.
“There’s a lot of known endowment there and there’s a lot of different deposit styles,” Williams said.
“It’s an area that is really conducive to using our sort of approach, which is very geophysical driven.
“Having said this, we will also be using the inputs from geochemistry and geology.”
Boss hopes to complete ground geophysics within the next two months and given that exciting targets are identified, will begin drilling straight away.
“And at the same time in parallel we’d be developing new projects,” Williams said.
Williams will be heading to Europe soon, tasked with snuffing out new projects to add to the company’s portfolio.
While he couldn’t specify where else in Europe the company was looking to pick up assets, Williams said there were some “pretty interesting” project opportunities.
“We’re not planning to slow down,” he said.
“I think now is the perfect time to be hunting around and looking for top quality assets.”
With a lot on the cards for the remainder of 2013, Williams said he wasn’t worried about raising funds for future capital expenditure requirements, despite the junior end of the market experiencing some level of difficulty boosting cash reserves.
“Other people are finding it difficult to get money, however we don’t believe that’s the case,” he said.
“If you’ve got good projects, good management, new technology that you know how to use, an established track record and there’s new technology being used where there’s known mineralisation then it’s a good story and I think investors will support that.”