TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – Zinc explorer Nevada Zinc has bought the Mountain View mine (MVM), located within the company’s Lone Mountain zinc project.
MVM had been an important outstanding acquisition target since the TSX-V-listed explorer started exploration and drilling in the Lone Mountain area about one year ago, and consolidated the company’s holdings in the area to 100% of all mineral titles.
The MVM property boundary was within 60 m of the closest point of drilling on Nevada Zinc’s Discovery zone and about 200 m from the company’s latest drill hole, LM-15-36, which intersected significant high-grade zinc and lead mineralisation, averaging 9.49% zinc and 1.34% lead (10.83% zinc plus lead) over a 91.44 m interval.
“We have continued to intersect long intervals of high-grade mineralisation that expand the overall footprint of the Discovery zone. We knew that to expand the footprint of the mineralisation much farther to the south-east, we needed to acquire the MVM property. We managed to buy the property with no further obligations and we can now go back to work on expanding the footprint of the Discovery zone [as well as start] an evaluation of the various targets around the MVM workings,” Nevada Zinc president and CEO Bruce Durham commented.
MVM possibly had about five-million pounds of zinc and 600 000 lbs of lead from nonsulphide mineralisation, comprising smithsonite, zincite, hydrozincite and cerussite.
MVM had produced high-grade zinc and lesser lead intermittently between 1942 and 1964.
It was not known whether any mining or exploration had been undertaken on the MVM property since 1964.
Nevada Zinc had little more information about the mining and exploration activities on MVM, although some additional information was likely available from private sources. The company would attempt to secure as much data as reasonably possible before starting work on the property.
Zinc prices had fallen to five-year lows as slowing demand from its biggest user, China, and rising inventories softened the base metal’s market. Used to rustproof steel, zinc had outperformed in the base metals space up until early this summer, when prices crashed. Recent research by Bank of America (BofA) Merrill Lynch Global Research noted that this sharp correction was influenced by a confluence of factors, including subdued global demand growth and record refined output in China.
However, it believed that zinc prices could rebound in the medium term on strong underlying fundamentals.