Del Carmen Overview
Del Carmen, the Company's flagship project, is located near the southern end of the El Indio Gold Belt.
- 70 kilometres south of the Veladero mine (current and past reserves of 14.5 million ounces of gold at an average grade of approximately 0.8 g/t)
- 90 kilometres south of the Pascua-Lama development project (reserves of 17.8 million gold equivalent ounces at an average grade of 1.44 g/t, which includes 671 million ounces of silver)
- 20 km southeast of the past producing El Indio mine (4.5 million ounces gold at approximately 8.33 g/t, plus 25 million ounces of silver and 472,000 tonnes of copper).
Malbex holds a 100% interest in the Del Carmen concessions, which total 15,129 hectares. The project hosts two large hydrothermal alteration systems that are the focus of our exploration. The principal target is a Veladero-style high sulphidation epithermal gold-silver system (oxide, bulk tonnage). Read more about Del Carmen geology.
The project lies between 3,700 m and 5,200 m in elevation. As result, exploration activities are typically suspended between mid-May and early October, although mining activities can continue year-around as at Barrick's nearby Veladero mine. In April 2011, we completed our second drill season at Del Carmen and reported an initial inferred NI 43-101 resource for the Rojo Grande area of the project in September 2011 measuring 25.4 million tonnes grading 1.00 g/t gold and 13.3 g/t silver for 816,600 ounces of contained gold and 10.9 million ounces of contained silver. Initial metallurgy showed an average gold recovery of 76.5%, demonstrating the oxide mineralization should be amenable to low-cost heap-leaching as at Veladero.
The 2011/2012 field season at Del Carmen began in October 2011, with an overall budget of $8 million, including drilling, geophysics and Phase 2 metallurgy.
