Hi @Lawrence2001 ,I'm glad you caught this from the Barrick Q4...

Hi @Lawrence2001 ,

I'm glad you caught this from the Barrick Q4 2022 Presentation. For anyone wondering, Lawrence posted part of page 24 from the powerpoint link he shared in the message above.

I will post the full image of page 24, as well as an excerpt from the Barrick quarterly call before commenting further:




Quote from Mark Bristow during the Barrick Quarterly Call:

"The Loulo district is still one of our happiest hunting grounds. Across the river in the Bambadji permit, in Senegal, we've defined the 26-kilometer long highly prospective trend. We call it the Bambadji Main Shear Zone and identified nine key targets along which we will be drilling to test for Tier 1 scale systems. This is in line with our strategy of testing the major structures on the Mali side of the district, which has delivered so much success."

source: https://seekingalpha.com/article/4578636-barrick-gold-corporation-gold-q4-2022-earnings-call-transcript

My Comments:

I believe this is an unexpected and provocative slide from Barrick. It seemed that Barrick was not going to highlight Bambadji in future quarterlies, considering it did not get any attention in the previous quarterly or the Investor's Day presentation. I personally thought that Barrick wanted to focus all immediate future growth attention on Reko Diq, the huge copper-gold porphyry project in Pakistan, or other copper-related projects like Jabal Sayid in Saudi Arabia. I was wrong!

There's a lot going on in this slide. I think the first important takeaway is that the bottom section titled "Long Section Looking East" ( Lawrence originally posted a blown-up version of part of this) is starting from Barrick's known, successful Yalea deposit in Mali on the left side, cross from Mali into Senegal, and then shows all of Barrick's Senegal targets from Latifa furthest north, to Gefa South furthest south. What stands out the most in the Senegal section is the schematic that Lawrence highlighted titled "Potential Yalea-type system +200m VD". While it's not 100% clear, I believe this is what a "potential deeper discovery" could look like on the Senegal side, which would be similar to the "known Yalea deposit" on the Mali side. So Yalea is real and the schematic is just potential.

If I am correct about that, it's the most confusing aspect of slide, and also the most exciting. The little lines under the targets 'Latifa', 'Kabetea', 'Diala', etc are actual early drill results from Barrick, many of which have been reported in previous quarterlies. What I believe Barrick is implying is that they will now start systematically drilling deeper than 150m vertical throughout all the Senegal targets, looking for the sweet spot similar to where Yalea's best grades are. While the Y-Axis on the bottom left is very small, if you blow it up you can see that the sweet spot is within the range of 200m-600m depth. As the slide notes, 95% of the drill holes so far are less than 150m vertical depth.

Barrick's Bambadji drilling so far has been exciting and would be very complementary to Chesser's Diamba Sud project next door (as mentioned many times by me in this thread). But they haven't found the true 'Tier 1' Barrick-scale deposits yet. It sounds like they are substantially increasing their time and investment in looking for "the next Yalea", which is very exciting! Keep in mind it is very unusual for major gold miners to devote a full slide to a greenfields project like Bambadji in a quarterly update. This reinforces that Chesser is in an excellent position and perhaps will increase new interest from corporates and institutions in this region in Senegal.

There's more I could say about this, but I will leave this for people to digest. I am happy to try to answer questions here if anyone needs some clarification or a different interpretation of what's going on.

Cheers,

MBG