TRANSCRIPTION OF FINANCE NEWS NETWORK INTERVIEW WITH ROBUST RESOURCES LIMITED (ASX:ROL) MANAGING DIRECTOR, GARY LEWISMelissa Beaumont Lee: Melissa Beaumont Lee for the Finance News Network. Joining me for a company update from gold and base metals explorer Robust Resources Limited
(ASX:ROL) is Gary Lewis. Welcome back Gary.
Gary Lewis: Thank you.
Melissa Beaumont Lee: Let’s start with your announcement regarding the commencement of exploration drilling at your North Romang Island project. What’s scheduled and what did your recent IP survey work reveal?
Gary Lewis: We’ve spent the last twelve months undertaking extensive exploration at North Romang including geological mapping, soil geochemistry, aero magnetics and geophysical surveys. The announcement today is the culmination of that work and presents our results for a 3D IP survey.
That survey found major IP anomalies which supports our thesis for major mineralisation, copper porphyry mineralisation. The IP anomaly we’ve found is in fact 4.5 kilometres long is open in three directions and is 500 vertical metres deep.
Melissa Beaumont Lee: And what’s planned having now achieved this result?
Gary Lewis: Well as a consequence of this exceptional result, we’ve immediately commenced a 5000 metre deep drilling programme at North Romang. We’ve moved our seventh rig up to site and that’s commenced drilling. The other thing we’re planning to do is extend the IP survey into the open areas.
Melissa Beaumont Lee: Thanks Gary. Now I see you’ve also announced today that you have six diamond drilling rigs undertaking an extensive infill drilling programme at your flagship Lakuwahi project at South Romang. And what’s the objective with this drilling campaign?
Gary Lewis: Our drilling at Lakuwahi is focused solely on delivering our maiden JORC Resource. Previous drilling campaigns were exploratory in nature where we were pushing the boundaries in mineralisation, whereas this campaign is focused solely on closer spaced drilling in order to increase the geological confidence of our maiden resource.
Melissa Beaumont Lee: Good so can you update us on the current drilling programme at South Romang and provide some clarification around the timing for an announcement of an initial JORC Resource?
Gary Lewis: With six rigs active at Lakuwahi our drilling productivity has never been greater. We’re currently sitting at around 140 holes for 18,000 metres of diamond core drilling, and the results to date are in line with our historical drillings, so all that’s looking very positive. In relation to timing, we’ll be delivering our maiden JORC Resource second quarter current financial year.
Melissa Beaumont Lee: Now I see in terms of a maiden JORC Resource, you flag that the original resource estimate will consist of both a base and precious metals estimate. Does this mean that you expect to release resource estimates for both base and precious metals?
Gary Lewis: That’s correct. In November of last year we announced to the markets an excellent metallurgical recovery results for our base metals at Lakuwahi. As a consequence of that, it again proved our hypothesis that we could bring in two income streams both in terms of precious metals and base metals. So we felt it more appropriate to bring out a JORC Resource based on precious metals as opposed to precious metals resource alone.
Melissa Beaumont Lee: And Gary you’ve also highlighted that any resource estimate is based on an initial exploration phase at Romang and that there is plenty more to come. Based on your estimates, how will you stage your exploration efforts for this project?
Gary Lewis: Given the scale of mineralisation at Lakuwahi, we’re talking about a 6 x 4 square kilometre mineralised zone. We’ve really had to focus our efforts on a small area. So all our drilling to date has essentially been around two prospects Batu Mas and Batu Hitam, which represents less than 2% of that mineralised area. So to be clear our maiden JORC will come from less than 2% of the bottom one third of the Island.
Melissa Beaumont Lee: Previously you mentioned mining on Romang Island would be relatively easy and low cost, is this still the case?
Gary Lewis: Well we’ve yet to undertake mining studies, the nature of the mineralisation whereby we have a gold silver rich blanket sitting above vast mineralisation, lead zinc copper gold silver lends itself to standard processing and therefore, lower production costs. But ultimately this will be borne out in future feasibility studies.
Melissa Beaumont Lee: Last question. Gary the next six months looks like it will define the Company and its two projects, where would you like to see Robust Resources at the end of 2011?
Gary Lewis: We’re in the fortunate position of having more than sufficient cash to aggressively explore both North and South Romang. Our budget for the current financial year is $15 million and we’re also allocating funds for two more rigs, which will bring us to nine diamond drill rigs. So it’ll be a very aggressive exploration programme over the next twelve months.
In relation to resources, once we’ve delivered our maiden resource we intend to go back to more exploratory drilling, which will allow us to push the boundaries of the mineralisation and to give continual upgrades on that maiden resource.
Melissa Beaumont Lee: Gary Lewis thanks for the update and congratulations on the work to date.
Gary Lewis: Thank you.
ENDS
