BTU Metals de-risking a huge land mass in famous Red Lake gold district, where its neighbor is Great Bear Resources

• Large land package adjacent to Great Bear Resources‘ asset
• Dixie Halo is historically underexplored
• Experienced management

What BTU Metals Corp does: 

BTU Metals Corp (CVE:BTU) (OTCMKTS:BTUMF) has put together a large land package in the famous gold mining area of Red Lake, Ontario, and drilling is currently underway.

Red Lake is famous for its high grade-deposits and has churned out over 30 million ounces of the precious metal in the past 85 years.

BTU’s flagship project is the Dixie Halo property, which covers 19,723 hectares and is contiguous with, and surrounds well-known gold explorer’s Great Bear Resources’ (CVE:GBR) Dixie project which has seen considerable, well-documented success with the drill bit.

The asset is close to all infrastructure needed to build and operate a mine, such as highways, power, gas, water and labor.

The project has seen limited drilling historically compared to the Great Bear asset and BTU has identified three priority targets. These are the ‘Gold in till’ target, which lies along a trend that mirrors geology of the LP fault discovered by  Great Bear.

Elsewhere, the Dixie Creek target is on trend with the LP Fault and a sampling program is underway. At the TNT polymetallic target, initial work has indicated a large gold-bearing VMS-style alteration system.

The LP Fault structure hosts Great Bear’s most recent discoveries, with drill assays such as 31.33 grams per ton (g/t) gold over 20.55 metres (m) uncovered.  BTU has noted that in greenstone belts, it is not uncommon for splays off the main fault to contain just as much gold.

BTU Metals’ management has good form. Chairman Vic Bradley, in a career spanning decades, has founded, financed and operated several mining companies, including the original Yamana Gold. Meanwhile, vice-president of exploration Bruce Durham has been involved in exploration for 40 years focusing on precious and base metal deposits in Ontario and Quebec.

How is it doing:

BTU Metals is currently undertaking a 2,000m drilling program that aims to evaluate a number of priority targets at Dixie Halo by the end of 2020, with additional drilling planned at the beginning of 2021.

In October, it said that a new litho-structural report for its Dixie Halo property in Ontario had identified 14 target areas that warranted follow up, with nearly half of the targets deemed high priority.

On November 24, the group updated further on exploration, including encouraging finds from this year’s till sampling program.

Gold-in-till results continue to come in from across the southwest-northeast (SW-NE) geological and structural trend, most of which are concentrated along an 8 kilometre (km) by 5 km area, with increased sample density beginning to allow for vectoring towards bedrock drill targets. 

The firm noted that the results have a high proportion of gold grain morphology classified as ‘pristine’ or ‘modified’ indicating that the malleable gold grains have not travelled far from their source, most likely within a few hundred metres.

BTU said it continues to assess the potential of AI targets generated by Windfall Geotek. The company also noted that a new target had been identified in the far west of the property, supported by both till results and grab samples.

Seven drill holes have been completed so far this fall with depths ranging from 100m to 250m, the group said, and it is expected that seven more holes focusing on the “gold in till” zone will be drilled before a planned mid-December break. The company added that drilling will resume in early January.

Inflection points:

• More drilling and exploration results
• Precious metals moves
• News from exploration firms nearby

What the boss says:

Speaking to Proactive’s Steve Darling on November 24 this year, BTU chief executive Paul Wood said: “Great Bear touched on a billion-dollar market cap this summer and we’re sitting a little shy of US$20 million and we can hear their drills turning, we can see their drills turning from time to time so our job is to find what they have and start to close that gap.”

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Story by ProactiveInvestors