following is the article on IGR from Gold and min gazette...
Cdchi1
Enthusiasm now reloaded In less than two years Integra Mining Ltd has transformed itself through a mixture of aggressive acquisitions, targeted exploration and sound management. Part of the transition was a name change in November last year from ReLODE Ltd to Integra Mining Limited, although the winds of change were blowing long before then. In October 2003 the company exercised an option to purchase what was then the Karonie gold project, located 110 kilometres east of Kalgoorlie-Boulder in Western Australia, from Equs Ltd. Soon after this initial acquisition Integra extended the tenement package to an area of 340 square km and renamed the project the Aldiss gold project. Within the project are the historic Main Zone pit and Harry’s Hill deposit. The company then announced a 450,000 ounce resource for the project. In October 2004 it picked up the historic Rowes Find and Harry’s Line gold mines, some 20 km north east of Aldiss, from the administrators of Deep Yellow Ltd. Then, in the first half of this year, Integra really started moving. In March the junior purchased the Randalls gold project, some 30 km west of Aldiss, from Solomon (Australia) Pty Ltd. Randalls contains four historic mines, including the incomplete Maxwells pit. Following on from this in July, Integra entered into a joint venture agreement with Avoca Resources Ltd over the Cowarna project. The Cowarna JV gave Integra an interest in a substantial portion of the ground between the Aldiss and Randalls projects. The final piece of the Integra puzzle to date is the option to purchase agreement the company has executed with Westex Resources Ltd over the Randall Hill tenements. Randall Hill adjoins the western boundary of the Randalls project and Integra has the option to purchase the project up until July 2009. To date — through strategic acquisitions and partnerships — Integra has established a position of regional dominance of about 1,850 square kilometres of tenure within the Randalls- Aldiss project area. While this regional consolidation was occurring, the company was aggressively exploring with extensive campaigns of RC drilling totalling close to 12,000 metres in the last financial year, enabling it to increase its resource base substantially. To date Integra has established 1.1 million oz of JORC-compliant gold resources across the Randalls and Aldiss projects. Of this figure, more than 80% (or 840,000 oz) are in the indicated resource category. Building on a strong ground holding in a prospective area and a solid resource base, the junior also has a clear plan moving forward. Integra’s managing director Chris Cairns explains how his company intends to incorporate four pits into a regional stand-alone operation. “We propose having the Main Zone and Harry’s Hill pits straddling a processing facility location, with French Kiss 20 km south and Maxwells being satellite operations providing highgrade feed,” Cairns said. The company is currently conducting a revised scoping study towards this end and hopes to have it completed in the first quarter of next year. In addition, Integra is drilling immediate opportunities including 2,000m of RC drilling at the French Kiss deposit following up on a previous result of 1m at 92 g/t gold returned in the last metre of the hole. Along with French Kiss the company has a number of high-grade targets throughout the Aldiss project scheduled for drilling. Some of these targets have already produced a significant quantity of close-to-surface nuggets hosted in quartz veining. “We’re very excited about the next six months that we’ve got in front of us,” Cairns said. “The board has approved a fairly ambitious exploration program over the next six months. “We’re going to be drilling a number of very exciting targets and it’s not just drilling off the edges of things people have found before — we’re looking at identifying new zones of mineralisation and giving ourselves the opportunity to make some new discoveries.” Integra has employed the services of Lithofire Consulting Geologists to review its exploration data across the majority of its projects to produce a big picture view of opportunities for new discoveries. “We’re still valued in the vicinity of $10 per resource ounce,” Cairns said, “which compares with an average of around $40 for similar junior companies.” “Eighty per cent of our resources are in the indicated category so it’s a high quality asset. Those oz are not going to go away, we’re undervalued relative to the asset and that’s not taking into account any valuation for the upside, possible production cash flow and the initiatives that we’ve recently announced.” One of the reasons for the market’s reluctance to ascribe greater value to Integra’s position could be attributed to a myth in sections of the industry that the Karonie ore body at Aldiss was too hard and difficult to process. “When Freeport constructed a mine out at Karonie Main Zone in 1988 they put in an oxide mill and the processing contractors felt they could over-rate the specified crushing capacity by 20% as had been their experience elsewhere in the goldfields on oxide deposits,” Cairns said. “When Freeport started putting through the Karonie ore — which is pretty much fresh ore at surface — the mill struggled to meet its designed throughput rate.” Cairns said the problems Freeport faced could have been overcome by using a front-end crushing circuit more suited to the material being processed. “While the ore is hard it is no harder than other operations in the Goldfields that have successfully produced at a handsome profit like, for example, LionOre’s Thunderbox project,” he said. “Thunderbox, in terms of resource grade, is half a gram shy of the grade at Aldiss.” Cairns also drew the analogy of Integra’s holdings in the Karonie greenstone belt with the Yandal Belt 20 years ago.
IGR Price at posting:
0.0¢ Sentiment: LT Buy Disclosure: Held