Regulus Resources

Been reading up on REG's Rio Grande Cu-Au-Ag project in Argentina.

Their September corporate presentation is on their website right now. Presently it asserts there will be a metallurgy report due in September, as well as a 43-101 on whatever holes had been drilled before this year. (I say "asserts" because every NR keeps pushing these dates back. As if, y'know, there's something wrong with them.) There was also a new drill program begun in July, expanding their inventory of data by about a third.

I prefer seeing things in pictures. So here's a couple straight from their corporate factsheet:



(What's very sexy about these pictures is the scale bar. I work in civil engineering, so the first thing I look at is the scale bar. Look at the fucking scale bar!)

Now, what follows for the rest of this post may all be completely and utterly wrong, since while I've worked in engineering I know nothing about economic geology. But it seems like these pictures show a 2500m x 200m x 200m deposit, with leftovers. That'd be about 200m tonnes of ore...?!? Yeah, maybe that's just for the "0.1% Cu outline"? I guess nobody mines 0.1% Cu. So okay, that's misleading.

Looks like about a 3:1 strip if you mined the low-grade, but probably a fuck of a lot more strip waste if you were only going after the high-grade zones, assuming they're subvertical as the picture shows. I guess the high-grade areas yield minimum 0.4% Cu, 0.5g/t Au, by REG's own admission. Then again, hole 34 yields 189m at mineable grade, and the cross-section above shows it cutting thru both high- and low-grade zones.

I guess anyone looking at this should (surprise surprise) ignore the stupid corporate presentations and go searching Sedar for each individual hole, eh? And I guess you'd have to look them up under Antares, not Regulus.

I'm sorry, but looking at that last paragraph, I don't think Casey would bother digging that deep, so they won't be pumping this anytime soon. (Explanation: someone on Stockhouse suggested REG was about to be a Casey pump.)

Seriously though. Gee, I wish I could study economic geology somehow, cos I'd love to resource-model this. Honestly, I think that would be fun. I guess the quantity of truly mineable "ore" is going to be entirely dependent on economics: I mean, are you only going after the stuff that's 0.5% Cu & 0.5g/t Au? Then what if you bring it down to 0.3% Cu & 0.3g/t Au? How much more ore do you get then? What's the lowest grade that's ever mined? It is simply dependent on economics?

Well, I guess if your economic cutoff shrinks this down to only 20Mt of ore, that's still $2/t for a $40M FD market cap company. Gross value of ore pre-strip pre-anything, at $1700/oz Au and $4/lb Cu, would be around $130/t... how much do majors pay for ore? I really doubt it works that way. But if the net value of the ore after costs were $10/t, giving 50% to Pachamama, that still leaves upside for REG, no? How much does Cu/Au oxide cost to mine, per ton? I should really look that up.

Oh well.... One for my handy-dandy rogue Peruvian analyst to do the math on, for me, someday.

It's nice I can finally buy it for much less than $1.40.

Also: You can read the Dundee PDAC write-up on Regulus at this link.