Aldebaran: Higher Grades Emerge at the Massive Altar Deposit

Trevor Hall (0:17)

All right, everybody, welcome back in to Mining Stock Daily. There were just a ton of new exploration job results out this morning. And one of those monster holes came from the San Juan province of Argentina with our friends from Aldebaran Resources. They do trade on the Venture Exchange with ALDE and on the OTCQX with ADBRF.

That headline hole, 1250 meters of .66% copper equivalent, included over 500 meters of just over 1% and another 214 meters of 1.5%. So happy to talk about this hole and the rest with CEO John Black. John, thanks so much for joining us. I know you're in an undisclosed location in Peru, but I appreciate you taking the time out with us this morning.

John Black (1:08)

Well, great. Thanks, Trevor. Yeah, we were really pleased to put out six new holes today. These are a combination of holes designed to convert inferred mineralization to indicated. I'd like to remind everybody that we're moving towards a pre-feasibility that we anticipate will be completed mid-next year. And an important part of that process to complete the pre-feasibility is we need to get as much of our mineralization into the measured and indicated categories as possible. So these were long holes into the main deposit areas themselves to confirm grade and improve confidence in the grade. So it's not surprising that they were good numbers, but they certainly came back as anticipated or even better. So we're quite happy to put these out, and I think it shows the strength of the deposit, both in terms of volume with these very long runs, but also with some very nice grades and portions of the deposit.

Trevor Hall (2:05)

John, at this stage of Altar's development, do holes like this change anything for you and Altar moving forward?

John Black (2:14)

They don't change anything. As I mentioned, they're really designed more to convert material to a higher degree of confidence, so that we can use those in those studies.

Probably the thing that changes things more than anything is these price increases that we're experiencing. Record highs in copper, again, several times this week, and that will cause us to reconsider what copper values we use as we move towards the pre-feasibility study. So the combination of confirming it's a large deposit, somewhat extending the mineralization, and with higher metal prices, may allow us to look at this as a larger open pit as we move forward. We're right in that process now of working up how we will move towards the pre-feasibility. Generally, when you move from a PEA to a pre-feasibility, you're just improving your estimates and refining your model. But given the nature of this deposit, we're looking at quite a number of options on how we can substantially improve that PEA as we move forward.

Trevor Hall (3:14)

Okay. So let's do, I want to go a little bit into the economics here, because that 214-meter interval was highlighted with a 1.57 percent copper equivalent. It was actually like one and a half percent just copper before even considering the precious metals factor in there. And John, you've talked about those higher grade cores within that enormous Altar system before.

Do you not understand how continuous are those cores becoming? Could they ultimately give you the ability to prioritize higher margin material earlier in the mine life?

John Black (3:53)

Absolutely. The higher grade cores come in a couple of manners. They're generally associated with the intrusive centers. So the system overall has three intrusive centers with higher grade cores and then a cloud of lower grade material around those.

And then one of those, the Altar Central Deposit, has some supergene enrichment. So it's an enhancement of the grade in the upper portion. And that's material that can be as closest to the surface, it's the best grade, and it's where the initial pit will start. So that will certainly drive early economics in the project.

Trevor Hall (4:30)

Okay, you did mention a lot of these infill holes being conversion holes. But there's also some geotechnical purposes as well with a number of these results. And you moved towards that PFS.

What are you learning from the geotechnical work about that balance between the open pit and underground mining at Altar?

John Black (4:51)

So far, no surprises on the geotechnical. As you point out, as we make this transition from PEA to pre-feeze, we have to start considering a lot of other factors than simply just tonnage and grade. So many of these holes are designed for dual purpose, both to convert mineralization to a higher degree of confidence, but we're also collecting a lot of detailed geotechnical drilling in this. And we'll have a subsequent batch of holes out here in another few weeks that will include more of the pure geotechnical holes. And so in some cases, they'll even be drilling out into the periphery of the deposit where we don't anticipate that we'll have mineralization, but they provide very critical information about what our slopes angles can be moving forward. We've, in a PEA, we've assumed just industry standard slope angles to do our evaluations. We have very competent rock where we believe that we should be able to support steeper walls, but we need the data to demonstrate that. And that's exactly what we're collecting right now, is both for slope stability, also a lot of information about water for the project, both in terms of do we have to dewater a pit, and if we do, how much water will we make up from that? That could be water that we don't have to acquire somewhere else. And we're beginning to do pure water type expiration work to define where our water sources will be for the project.