TORONTO, March 27, 2018 /PRNewswire/ - Stina Resources Ltd. ("Stina" or the "Company") (CSE: SQA) (OTCQB: STNUF) (Frankfurt: 01X) is pleased to announce plans for an extensive spring /summer work program at its Bisoni McKay / Bisoni-Rio vanadium project near Eureka, Nevada.
Stina's Bisoni McKay and Bisoni-Rio project is one of the largest pure play vanadium projects in North America totaling 4,115 acres contiguous to Prophecy's Gibellini deposit. Furthermore, vanadium is more often found in association with other metals such as iron, lead, or uranium that must be first removed before vanadium recovery. Exploration to date has indicated that the Bisoni McKay's pure play vanadium resource does not possess significant concentrations of any of these metals.
"Only 12% of the Bisoni McKay area has been drilled and none of the Bisoni-Rio. At that time of earlier exploration, vanadium was primarily a steel catalyst. A lot has changed," explained Brian Stecyk, CEO of Stina. "It's a completely different situation now, particularly after Stina's acquisition of the vanadium CellCube assets of Gildemeister GmbH. The new company, Enerox, will require vanadium for its battery technology. Not only is the demand for vanadium increasing, but there have been improvements in assaying and metallurgical recovery."
Previous Stina work at the project resulted in the estimation of an NI 43-101 Indicated Resource of 11,900,000 tons at an average grade of 0.39% V2O5, and an Inferred Resource of 7,000,000 tons at an average grade of 0.42% V2O5 (see company news release September 13, 2016). The Indicated Resources are contained in a zone approximately 200 m in strike length, while the Inferred Resources covers approximately an additional 200 m of strike length extending to the south. The mineralized zone appears to be open at depth and extends to the north into the Bisoni-Rio property. In 2017, Stina staked 162 claims on the Bisoni-Rio property, from the Bisoni McKay right up to and abutting the Gibellini vanadium property.
The program is designed to improve confidence in existing defined mineral resources and to add to those resources. The program will include approximately 1,600 meters of core drilling and approximately 9,000 meters of reverse circulation drilling. In addition, the Company plans to collect a 20 tonne bulk sample of mineralized material for additional metallurgical testing. The budget for the program is approximately US $1.5 million and is expected to start in early spring. This extensive exploration with the technical advances in drilling, sampling, and recovery testing over that time gives Stina excellent prospects of enriching the quality and value of its asset.
"The Bisoni McKay (including the adjacent Bisoni-Rio section) is very unique and may well have far more potential than initially thought," adds Stecyk.
Highlights of the 2018 program:
- Drilling will give coverage of the main resource area (Area A North) on 30m line spacing, adding to the confidence in the current Indicated Resource;
- Drilling adjacent to six holes from the 2005 and 2007 drill programs that ended while still in well-mineralized material, to test the full extent of the mineralization in these locations (five of these holes are in the areas covered by the Indicated Resource). Two of these holes ended in the highest grade intersections encountered to date on the property (DDH BMK 05-01, 0.76% V2O5 over 35 m, and DDH BMK 05-02, 0.66% V2O5 over 40 m). This information is taken from data and cross sections published in the NI 43-101 compliant Phase 2 Technical Report (amended August 29, 2016), authored by Edwin Ulmer and filed on SEDAR under the Company's name. These two intersections have been verified by the Company's Qualified Person, who has reviewed the geological drill logs and all the relevant original assay certificates;
- A program of re-assaying samples from previous drilling where, in some cases, vanadium values exceeded the detection limits of the analytical method used in 2005 and 2007, and additional "overlimit" analyses were not run. These samples, all from the above-mentioned core holes (05-01 and 05-01), were reported by the laboratory as "greater than 10,000 ppm V," but were then recorded in the drill hole database used for resource estimation as simply "10,000 ppm V" (the limit of the testing method). For reference, a concentration of 10,000 ppm V equates to 1.79% V2O5. The re-testing will be designed to ascertain what the true grades of these samples are;
- Extending the defined mineralized trend to the southern portions of Area A where previous drilling and trenching indicates that the mineralization extends to the south for at least an additional 350 meters of strike length, and has outlined an Inferred Resource;
- Subsequent comprehensive drill programs for two additional areas to the south (Areas B and C) which have seen trenching and limited previous drilling with encouraging results. This drilling will help determine whether the mineralization continues through Areas B and C, which have not been drilled in several decades;
- Collection of a 20 tonne bulk sample for further metallurgical sampling, including continued metallurgical studies at Hazen Research, Pacific Northwest National Laboratories, and the University of Calgary; and the research team at Enerox. The leader of the Enerox research team has over 17 years of flow battery experience and has registered over 20 patents of the 75 patents that are part of the Gildemeister asset purchase;
- Flying a drone topographic survey of the property;
- Conversion of all technical data to the metric system and tightening up of survey control to increase confidence in the mineral resource.
The disclosure of technical information contained in this release has been reviewed and approved by Chris M. Healey, P. Geo. who is a geological consultant for the company, and a qualified person as defined under NI 43-101.
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SOURCE Stina Resources Ltd.
