RCM - 98.7% recoveries from NSW silver projects
Our silver Investment Rapid Critical Metals (ASX: RCM) just announced silver recoveries of up to 98.7% from one of its NSW silver projects.
RCM has consolidated three high grade silver projects in northern NSW - Webbs, Webbs Consol and Conrads - which together host ~67M ounces of silver equivalent at ~400g/t.
That consolidated, high grade district is why we Invested and RCM is targeting 100M ounces of silver equivalent resources through drilling.
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RCM is currently drilling at Webbs right now looking to grow that resource.
Today’s announcement feeds into the scoping study RCM has currently underway across its projects.
The scoping study will basically wrap technical mining assumptions around the RCM’s resources and then today’s mettalurgical results get plugged in to come up with a “recovery factor”.
The higher the recoveries the more silver can be recovered from mined material.
So RCM’s nunbers - Silver recoveriew up to 98.7%, lead recoveries of 97-99%, zinc recoveries of up to 93.3%, and silver concentrates grading as high as 2,051g/t.
Is a solid start…
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High recoveries are generally a positive sign for project economics as you want to be extracting as much of the valuable metal from the ground as is reasonable to do so (weighing up time and cost).
So seeing some recoveries well above 90% at this early stage is a good sign that most of the resource, IF processed, could be turned into cashflow and not sent back into the ground through the tailings.
These are early stage "rougher" tests though, it’s the next round of testwork will define the concentrate grades RCM could actually sell.
Here is a look at the full results from today, noting the high grade silver in the concentrate produced:
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What else is RCM up to?
RCM is currently drilling at Webbs, following up the potential parallel silver lode it hit late last year which could mean a second silver system sitting right next to the existing 14.2M ounce Webbs resource.
Drilling got underway drilling has been going for a while now, so assays could be due in the coming weeks (if not days).
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We covered the silver drilling commencement here:
RCM has also quietly been progressing its Prophet River gallium-germanium project in Canada and recently the drill permits were received, with drilling due to start in the coming weeks:
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Most recently we covered the update on the gallium/germanium project here:
What’s next for RCM?
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🔄 Gallium/Germanium drilling in Canada
We want to see RCM lock in a rig and start drilling the project.
The drilling window in that part of the world usually starts about now and runs through to October/November, before the winter months kick in.
So ideally we see that project drilled inside this current drilling window.
RCM expects drilling to start in “late July” with assays due next quarter.
🔄 Silver drilling in NSW (Webbs project)
With the first of two rigs now turning at Webbs, we want to see RCM extend the existing resource at Webbs to the south.
And drill out the parallel structure theory.
The ideal scenario would be a confirmed NEW discovery to the west and extensions to the existing resource to the south.
🔄 Target generation on newly acquired asset
On the asset RCM acquired recently we want to see the company complete LiDAR surveys, surface sampling and geophysics.
Ultimately, we want to see the historic results validated and then a bunch of drill targets ranked from most interesting to least ahead of a drill program on the project.
🔄 Scoping study across projects in NSW
We also want to see RCM complete a scoping study for its projects in NSW - this will be the first time we get a sense of the potential economics of the projects 67M ounce silver equivalent resource base.
