Cartier Resources (ECR) - Technical Analysis

Merlin Marr-Johnson recently spoke with Phillipe Cloutier, President and CEO at Cartier Resources, Quebec, Canada-based junior minor. He shared with us some of his company’s recent activities with their gold and silver projects, and in particular at their flagship asset, Chimo Mine. 

Company Overview

Cartier Resources, founded in 2006,  is a gold and silver explorer focused in the Precambrian Abitibi greenstone belt of Quebec. The Abitibi is a top-tier jurisdiction because of its outstanding geology, attractive mining laws, and excellent infrastructure. 

The company’s principal approach is to focus on known gold-bearing properties where the structural geology and mineralogy are well controlled and predictable. They prefer to acquire projects where discoveries have been made and then advance them to higher value status. During the last downturn in precious metal prices, Cartier was able to acquire four Abitibi projects by applying that methodology. 

The company currently has interests in seven precious metals assets: Chimo Mine, Benoist, Wilson, Fenton, MacCormack, Dollier and Cadillac Extension. They range in maturity from early exploration stage upward through mineral extension and delimitation drilling stages of development. Cartier’s most advanced project is Chimo Mine. 

Leadership at Cartier Resources

In addition to Cloutier, the management team at Cartier is composed of Gaétan Lavallière, Vice President; Nancy Lacoursière, Chief Financial Officer; and Ronan Deroff, Senior Geologist. Overall, this group has well over six decades of professional experience. A five-person board of directors provides guidance to the management team.

Recent Company News

Cartier Resources has achieved a number of milestones so far in 2021. The company started the year by delivering a maiden resource system at the Benoist property and then moved into a diamond drill program there.  It also delivered a third resource estimate at its flagship Chimo Mine project, where it added 2 Moz. in the indicated and inferred category. While that was happening the company was also working on internal engineering studies on that Chimo Mine project to get it to the preliminary economic assessment (PEA) level.  

Cartier also acquired one hundred percent of the Fenton deposit, which it had, until then, shared fifty percent with the government. Additionally, it was able to deliver two joint ventures:  One on the Dollier gold project, just south of Chibougamau, and another on the Wilson gold project in the greenstone belt.  

Cartier is wrapping up the year by launching another diamond drill program at the Fenton project, which should start turning in February 2022, and advancing on the PEA that should be delivered early in 2022.

The Particulars of the Recent Drilling At Benoist

Cartier started the year with a 30,000 m diamond drill program and it was a quite difficult and slow process. The maiden resource estimate that the company put out is located underneath a lake and because of that the company had two drilling crews.  One was a traditional diamond drilling crew and the other one was a directional driller crew. The holes had to be drilled from the side of the lake and therefore the engineering of those holes was a bit difficult.  

The first 200 m or 300 m were quite slow.  The company built a camp on the Benoist site by the lake that was, as best as possible, COVID-proof.  It had strict protocols and they also built a temporary telecommunications tower because of the directional drilling so that it could do real-time decision-making. All in all, it was complex drilling, a lot slower and a bit more expensive than anticipated.  However, the system that was envisioned beneath the Benoist deposit is there. The system is still wide-open. Cartier had delineated over 108 geophysical anomalies and it barely tested three at this point in the assessment.  

At the end of the day, the company drilled 17 drill holes in total on the project, two pilot holes and of those 2 pilot holes, 11 branches and that covered 350m in strike length below the deposit in 2 cross-cuts beneath that extension.  The deepest one reached 1,300m at depth and the company was still seeing the string of pyrite.

The results were a bit disappointing but, according to Cloutier, if you fall in love with a project and you become stubborn maybe you are not reading the signs properly. What he is going to do with Benoist, is wait for the assay results to come in, step back, and look at it with a fresh mind.

Fenton Update

Until recently, Cartier was not the operator of the Fenton project. However, as of April, it became a one hundred percent owner. Fenton is much more remote than Chimo Mine. At Fenton, the mineralized zones occur entirely within the basaltic rocks. The area is covered by numerous forestry roads and so there's infrastructure present. It is going to be quite unlike anything that the company has done in the past four years.

At Fenton there is widespread dissemination within massive sulfide-like occurrences. There is a very strong silica component associated with that and the ore-bearing zones can be up to twenty or thirty m wide. The mineralization essentially consists of hydrothermal alteration within the silica. The higher grades are 40-50 g/t over two to three m and maybe sometimes five m within broader intersections that grade 3 to 4 g/t over up to thirty m.  

Despite the fact that this is a complex Precambrian terrane, the ore-bearing units appear to occur as agglomerated pencil-shared cylinders. It is currently exposed at surface and there are many trenches over 350 m long. In the surface occurrences there is very little diamond drilling done. The occurrence is associated with prominent geophysical anomalies. There are a few outcrops where the company was obtaining grab-samplings in the order of 40-50 g/t.  

Cartier is conducting a geophysical survey to pinpoint the targets. The main concern is to identify targets where it can generate ounces rapidly. The company has a very exciting year ahead of itself at Fenton.

Chimo Mine: the Flagship Project

Chimo Mine is Cartier Resource’s most advanced project. The company has been working on it for the past three and a half years. The company initiated drilling in 2017 and has delivered three resource estimates. Past production at Chimo was about 400,000 oz. and there is a wealth of information: over 4,000 drill holes, 60,000 assays and a lot of the old mine workings and maps.

Cartier has been able to develop a very robust drill program and has encountered over twenty-seven gold zones in the last three years. There is a lot of upside potential in the other un-drilled zones.  But the company felt that if it wanted to build ounces rapidly it had better focus on the obvious zones.  

All of Cartier’s resources at Chimo Mine are located within 500 m of the existing shaft and underground drifts, down to about 1 km. While the company was running the resource estimate work, it was also doing internal engineering studies with the abundance of data that it has.  

In March of 2021, Cartier delivered the third resource estimate. It consists of 2M oz.: 600,000 to 700,000 in the indicated category at 3.2 g/t and 1.3M in the inferred category at 2.7 g/t. The company is looking at a system averaging 2.4Moz. over a 1 km column, or 2,400 oz. per vertical m. Of interest nearby, Goldex with Agnico Eagle is mining 1.5g/t at 1.5 km depth and Alamos Gold’s Young Davidson Mine is producing from 2.7 g/t at a depth of 1.5 km. 

Upcoming PEA at Chimo Mine

Cartier is looking to produce a PEA at Chino Mine in 2022, perhaps as early as the first quarter. The company has a 21M t deposit there that will be evacuated over a twelve-year period. It looks to be a 6,000-t/day operation. There will be many components included in the PEA, including rock mechanics, metallurgy behavior, ore-sorting technology, and stope designs. The ore-sorting component will consist of optical sorting on the cores as well as x-ray fluorescence (XRF) sorting on the remainder. The high-grade ore is in the quartz and the silica component but the majority of the gold is found in the salvage itself where there's moderate to low grade gold in pyrite-rich basalt and non-refractory material.

Obviously what favors this project a lot is there are several mills nearby. Cartier will be looking at toll milling to avoid building a new mill and a new tailings site. However, the company does want to understand the metrics for building its own mill and its own tailings impoundment site. The Ministry of Environment is going to favor a scenario in which Cartier is not building a new environmental scar.

Cloutier is not particularly worried about the average grade coming in around the 3 g/t mark. There are mines in the district producing or about to produce at or near that grade. For example, Yamana is proposing a mine at the Wasamack location, which will produce from rock with about 3 g/t. The Chimo Mine itself was a past producer and at that time head grade was 3.8 g/t.  Cloutier indicated that the company would take a look at the gold benchmarking study documented earlier this year in a Crux Investor report and will take that information into consideration when preparing the PEA.

M&A Possibilities

Cartier Resources has about $6.3M in the bank. Despite that, the company is not overly focused on M & A possibilities. They are prepared for it if something interesting turns up. Indeed, the company is not looking to develop Chimo Mine by itself. 

Closing Thoughts

Cloutier is eager to move forward and create value for shareholders.  It is full speed ahead with the PEA at Chimo Mine and additional work at the Fenton project. Investors should look for the PEA announcement early in 2022. 

To find out more, go to the Cartier Resources Website