I want to tell you what we’re doing in Nova Scotia. And we’re applying what we learnt in WA through the late 1980s/1990s and applying it to an area that really hasn’t seen this sort of application. Our track record in Plutonic – we grew the company into about the second/third largest gold producer up until the late 1990s. We were producing over 0.5 million ounces a year from six deposits; we discovered 11 million ounces of gold. We were taken over by Homestake, then Barrick and we went and did a few things on our own, and ended up with this project in Nova Scotia.
So we focused on much the same as what we did in WA and particularly with an open pit perspective. At this time we got 450,000 ounces of reserves in a single open pit. There’s a resource inventory of 1.2 million ounces, attributable to Atlantic Gold
(ASX:ATV), is about a bit under a million ounces of that.
There’re three things that we’re doing in the project pipeline. The flagship project is the Touquoy project which is pre-development stage, Cochrane Hill is at a feasibility stage and the regional exploration throughout this belt of rocks in Nova Scotia. So here’s the property Touquoy and Cochrane Hill, Province of New Brunswick, State of Maine in the US and the Titanic is somewhere behind me I would say.
This is what we saw in 2002, it seems like a long time ago now, but these existing drill holes from a property that was shown to us. What struck us was there’re intersections over 100 metres long of relatively even-grade for a goldmine or for a gold deposit, eminently open pit-able. We said to ourselves then, if this was in WA it would have been in the bank years ago, and at that time gold was a bit over $400 an ounce. So it’s certainly our view now. There are reasons why it hasn’t been banked just yet and I’ll explain why.
The Touquoy deposit is here at a little place called Moose River Gold Mines. It’s about an hour’s drive out of Halifax. Halifax is a nice city of 350,000/400,000 people, four universities, great place to bring people to work. It’s about 45 minutes from the international airport, fly directly to London, New York, Toronto. So it’s well placed infrastructure wise. And Cochrane Hill is about 80 kilometres in a straight line further to the east.
Just very quickly on mineral resources, we’re in Canada so we’ve done our 43-101s, it’s also JORC Code, this happens to be a 43-101 slide. The point about it is, the main Touquoy deposit is almost measured and indicated, in fact there are reserves there now. Cochrane Hill is round about the same size, about 500,000 ounces. Touquoy West is a little satellite deposit I won’t dwell on. You add it all up; under a JORC Code you get the 1.2 million ounces - mineral reserves 450,000 ounces of proved and probable. And that’s from a feasibility study we completed in July of last year - July 2010, and we’ve recently updated that to today’s costs and revenues.
