(MENAFN - ProactiveInvestors - Australia) Latin Resources (ASX: LRS) is entrenched in Peru, where the company is focused on advancing the world class potential Guadalupito Iron Sands Project and exploring tenements covering 110,000 hectares.
Chris Gale, managing director of Latin, discussed the forthcoming scoping study for the company's flagship Guadalupito Project, along with the potential for gold and andalusite production, during Question Time at Proactive Investors' 'Stars in 2012 Series' in Sydney, Wednesday 6th June.
The presentation on the night can be ACCESSED HERE.
Guadalupito hosts a maiden JORC Resource of 119 million tonnes at 5.7% Heavy Minerals, released in December 2011.
Meanwhile, Latin and Hong Kong's Junefield Group have begun a highly anticipated maiden drilling program at the company's Mariela Iron Project in the Ilo district of southern Peru.
This region has become a "hotspot" for copper discoveries and is a renowned iron oxide copper gold district which should see lightly capped (37 million) Latin Resources being watched closely now that drilling has begun.
Question from the audience
What kind of percentage of income would you get for andalusite and gold compared with the other elements of your material?
Chris Gale
We looked at that initially, what can we extract quicker and as cheap as we can from that orebody, that was the iron, the gold and the andalusite. Harmony actually mapped this deposit in 2002 as an alluvial gold deposit. We put the markers over a million ounces of gold in this particular deposit, it runs about 0.3-0.5 grams and ends up in the mine as 53 micron fraction in the sand fraction so it's going to be a bi-product for us. The iron we'll sell at port, so we're not talking about shipping this stuff to China. Current numbers we have about publicly in the market, the gold as I said is running 0.3-0.5g/t, we're running at about 6-7% iron in there, the andalusite is 30% of the deposit, this will be the largest andalusite deposit in the world. Currently the Africans are producing andalusite themselves for about 400 a tonne, the Africans costs are about 200-230 a tonne, so we think we can produce it a lot cheaper than that, but the scoping study will be out in the next five or six weeks, we have a pretty good idea then.
Question from the audience
In your Scoping Study have you got any metallurgical tests?
Chris Gale
The Scoping Study is waiting for metallurgical test work now, it's being done by Mineral Technologies in Queensland and Karrara, so we're waiting for that to finalise it. There will be metallurgical met work testwork in the scoping study.
Question from John Phillips, chief operating officer of Proactive Investors
The upgraded JORC Resource coming through in the next couple of months, just wondering how many metres of drilling will be going into that?
Chris Gale
We're drilling about 600 metres a month, but remember we're only drilling at 20 metres, 30 metres depth at some points. The first JORC Resource was about 70 holes so we completed the second phase of our program and I'd suggest that we'll have the assays completed in another four or five weeks and JORC will be another four. Snowden's doing our JORC Resource, and that will be out in about 2 months.
