TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – Strait Gold, which owns an early stage copper/gold exploration project in Peru, has inked some eight confidentiality agreements with companies interested in the Alicia deposit, CEO Jim Borland said on Wednesday.

The firms were interested in the project, rather than buying equity stakes in his company, Borland said.

The agreements were with “small companies like us where there’s potential that we can work together”, but Strait had also received interest from “some very large companies – the biggest companies that are working in Peru”, he told Mining Weekly Online in an interview.

In an earlier presentation at the Focus on Peru seminar in Toronto, Borland had said that Alicia was probably the most attractive property that a junior held in the area, around 120 km south of Cusco, and that bigger companies had recently bought out explorers to access their properties there.

First Quantum Minerals in October last year announced a deal to acquire Canadian junior Antares Minerals for C$460-million, while Hudbay in January agreed to buy Norsemont in a $520-million deal for its Constancia project, both located near Constancia.

“I know that it’s on the radar screen of some of the players,” Borland said on Alicia.

The property is still in the early stages of exploration, with Strait having only drilled 2 000 m, with a further 5 000 m pending, which will proceed once the company has a new exploration permit.

The second round of drilling would “go a long way” to allowing the company to publish a maiden resource statement at Alicia, Borland commented. He hopes to have this completed by the end of next year, but points out that the timing depends on the government granting the new permit.

Other companies operating in the area include diversified major Xstrata, which is building the $4.2 billion Las Bambas copper project, expected to produce 400 000 t/y of copper, as well as gold and silver.

Xstrata is also developing the nearby Antapaccay mine, which will produce 140 000 t/y of the red metal.

Strait Gold has a C$4-million market capitalisation on the TSX-V, where its shares leapt 33% on Wednesday to close at C$0.08.
 

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