Argenta Silver Reports 95% Recoveries at El Quevar

Trevor Hall (0:17)

All right, moving right along here. We're going to continue with silver exploration in Latin America, and actually we're going to cover Argenta Silver in this update with my good friend, Joaquin, CEO of the company. They do trade on the venture with AGAG and on the OTCQX with AGAGF.

You did publish new metallurgical test results here from El Quevar yesterday here, Joaquin. So this is obviously always important because you got to know what you can recover in mining. It's not just all about high grade and drilling results. So walk us through what you found out.

Joaquin Marias (0:49)

Well, we are very, very happy to announce our preliminary metallurgical test work, and these results are just preliminary.

And I would like to tell you what's the story behind this.

So we decided to make the metallurgical test work. I asked the metallurgist to start working on this. And they run the first pass of primary flotation, which is called rougher. And I suddenly get a call from him because it was supposed that when they finish the first pass, they will let us know the results and we will publish them. But he calls me and he's like, man, we got 99% recovery on roughers and 95% average on the 15 samples that you sent us. So we sent 15 samples across the deposit. And he's telling me this and I'm like, well, that's a very high result, 99%.

And he's like, yeah, but if you put this out, it's too high. We need to clean two of those samples. So we show what is the result on the cleaners. And the cleaners is just cleaning those rougher samples. And we cleaned two of those. And that's the result that we put out, 96% recoveries with a concentrate of 14,857 grams per tonne of silver on the concentrate. The interesting part of this, Trevor, is that this is only the first pass with no optimization at all. So when he's telling me this, I'm asking him, how better this can get if we already got 99% with no optimization at all? And well, that's what we are going to see afterwards. We are still working on this. This is ongoing, and the metallurgical test work should be done on the incoming 30 to 60 days. And the objective of this is to obtain final products. We want to obtain the final concentrate from these 15 samples, which is a representation of all the deposit. And with that, we will know exactly what is the properties, what are the properties of this concentrate. So far, we understand that it's going to be very low in lead, zinc, copper, and other elements, but the final properties will be completed on the final product that it's going to be in the next 60 to, well, 30 to 60 days.

Trevor Hall (3:08)

Can you tell us where those samples came from, what part of the project?

Joaquin Marias (3:13)

Yeah, of course. So we are starting the main deposit here, the main deposit metallurgical test work. And it's from the Jaques Che deposit, right? So the 15 samples are drill holes that are all along the deposit. The deposit is like 1.5 kilometer long, along that 1.5 kilometers that we have picked up different drill holes.

These drill holes have been picked up with 3D modeling, with a lot of different characteristics, drills that we understand that will have different mineralogy and different characteristics. So we are testing actually the variability across the deposit, right? And that's why this study was so important, and having this homogenic results on the rougher, on the primary flotation, it's so important because we are not starting to see very low recoveries against very high recoveries. We are having an average of 95% recovery on rufflers, and this is very constant all across the deposit, which is telling us that silver can be liberated very easily from the metal, from the mineral, sorry, and that silver flotates perfectly.

Trevor Hall (4:30)

Yeah. So it's a huge de-risking part for the entire El Quevar project here. But with these high recoveries, how much capital allocation do you continue to put towards optimization?

How much is the ROI worth if you can get another 1%?

Joaquin Marias (4:48)

Well, the thing is that this is a study that has been already paid.

There is no more to pay or no more to do. And that's the great thing, that it's not that we need to do great things here. Just having this as it is, it's amazing. So thinking about optimization and blending, it's going to give us a much more refined product for the future, which makes this a niche product for the market. Today, you don't have pure concentrates of silver around the world. You get concentrates that have a lot of lead, a lot of zinc, a lot of copper. And actually, those are the ones that you should be taking care of when you think of a smelter. Because on the smelter, you cannot put a lot of lead or a lot of zinc on a silver smelt, and you need to be very careful with those concentrations. So this is going to be a niche product. I think that plenty of companies along the world will be looking for things like this, so they can blend their own things with this thing that is going to be so pure out there, right?