JBY - Metallurgical testing underway. Drilling to start in the coming weeks.

Our US precious metals Investment, James Bay Minerals (ASX: JBY) just put out an update on its gold project in Nevada, USA.

JBY announced it would be doing metallurgical testing on the deeper higher grade part of its 1.37M ounce gold JORC resource.

JBY’s current JORC resource is split into two different sections:

1. The lower grade, shallow oxide material (~350k ounces at ~0.32-0.4g/t) – metwork testing has previously been done on this part of the project and there is a 2022 Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA) which shows this shallow section could produce 32,050 ounces of gold per year for 6 years at a cost of ~US$1,078 per ounce. (source)
2. The much higher grade, deeper Skarn mineralisation (984k ounces at 6.67g/t) – this section hasn’t previously had any network testing done on it before. This is the section JBY will be running tests on next.

The difference between the two sections is that the shallower oxide materials can be heap leached whereas gold recoveries from the deeper skarn using heap leach processing methods aren’t as effective.

(Heap leaching is a low cost way of recovering gold from mostly oxide materials)

With the metwork testing, JBY’s will essentially be trying to work out the best way of processing the skarn material and getting the best possible gold recovery rates.

Higher recoveries ultimately mean better economics when a company goes to mine a project.

JBY’s high grade skarn component is hosted in similar geology to the Fortitude mine which is now part of the Newmont Barrick N.G.M Phoenix Mine Complex next door to JBY.

That Fortitude mine produced over 2.3M ounces of gold at 6.68g/t grades with 90% recoveries.

So we aren’t expecting JBY to run into any technical troubles with the metwork results.

What else is JBY up to at its project?

In the short term, the two key bits of newsflow we are watching out for from JBY is exploration results.

JBY just recently put out its maiden JORC compliant 1.37M ounce resource estimate.

The next step will be to see if that resource can get bigger.

Next up we want to see:

Assay results from the deeper diamond drilling 🔄

In the short term we want to see what comes of the deeper diamond drillhole JBY drilled beneath its existing resource.

JBY mentioned in today’s announcement that “Assay results from recent drilling are expected in H1 2025”, so this news could be close now.

Next round of drilling (starting this quarter) 🔄

JBY expects to kick off a drill program later this quarter.

As mentioned earlier, we are looking forward to JBY’s drill program because the company will test three different theories:

1. Drilling out the shallow mineralisation currently outside of its resource model (and hopefully bringing it into the model in future resource updates).
2. Drilling in between JBY’s two resources (shallow and deep sections)
3. Drilling extensions to the north and south of the current JORC resource along strike.