San Anton Resource Corp

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“What most excites me in the industry is to find and be associated with deposits that have a very good chance to become mines. So I find San Anton very exciting. It’s a very large and secure deposit with a very well defined resource, so it stands a good chance of becoming an operational mine in the future” San Anton Resource Corp President and CEO John Cook says.

“Of all the things I’ve been involved in I find this to be one of the most exciting in the industry.”

Cook has been in the mining game for many years, the past 15 of which he has spent in small cap companies in North America.

San Anton is at a truly crucial point. Ready to start searching for financing to move their Cerro Del Gallo project on and into operation, but in-touch with the current marketplace volatility in going about this, Cook explains what has pulses racing at this Mexican mining site and how they plan to take a “rather old-fashioned” approach to pursue their goals securely and successfully.

THE CERRO DEL GALLO DEPOSIT
“Our story started with an Australian company – Kings Minerals –, which became interested in the San Anton project in the Mexican state of Guanajuato and made a deal with a predecessor company to Goldcorp who owned and was exploring the property at the time. Subsequently, Kings Minerals formed San Anton to create better exposure of the project to the North American market, simply for the benefit of the project” Cook explains.

“Money was raised in North America and that money was used to basically explore the Cerro Del Gallo deposit to its current level of resources.”

Today the Cerro Del Gallo deposit hosts a large resource, albeit low grade in terms of gold.

“The approximate 450 million tons of measured and indicated resources only has a grade of about a quarter of a gram of gold. It also has some copper and substantial amounts of silver, low grade nonetheless. Geologically the whole resource is divided into three domains. An intrusive domain which is basically in the middle, and around that a gold domain and further around that is a copper domain. It’s like a double donut. The intrusive is the hole in the middle and then the other two are around it” Cook says.

“When we look at the gold domain only, which is where we’ve been focusing our attention recently, the overall grade of the gold goes up to 0.5 of a gram. And when we take a closer look at that gold domain we find zones with substantial tonnages within it where the grade is three quarters of a gram of gold.”
But these closer inspections don’t stop there.

“We’re now examining an even smaller tonnage – around 20 million tons – of higher grade gold within the overall gold domain of about one gram per ton. This is our focus at the moment on how this project can and could be developed in the future” Cook explains.

Although this more concentrated inspection was not their original plan for the Cerro Del Gallo deposit, San Anton has remained flexible in their approach going forward, and look set to enjoy rewarding results for their foresight and ability to manage the project.

FUTURE FINANCING
“The original concept was that this was going to be a very large deposit, which it is, but a large project based on very high rates of mining and treatment. However, with the market as it has been in the last year, we now have to focus on something different” Cook says.

“Our attitude to this project is now more old-fashioned in that we’re focusing on something that is going to be smaller in the first instance and going to require far less capital. We can then use that going forward to be the platform to which the project can be developed on a much larger scale in the future. But if the market stays as it is now and this can only be a much smaller project, then we want to ensure and assure ourselves that this is going to be a viable project in its own right.”

Earlier this year San Anton enjoyed a sizeable tax refund to the tune of $1.1 million Canadian dollars.

“It will allow us to come up with a good engineering story for the project and will then form a bridge for us to get to the next stage of financing when hopefully the marketplace will be a little better. It’s been a very important step for us to get that money back into our pockets so that we can use it to benefit the project” Cook says.

“We need to raise a certain amount of money which will allow us to proceed forward and there’s really three steps to this. There’s the engineering step which is ongoing, there’s the permitting step which needs to be accelerated and the other step that needs to be done is to purchase more of the surface rights to enable the mine and the area for the treating and processing of the ore into bullion to proceed.”

With their adaptable approach, recent windfall, clear goal for financing and advanced stage of exploration, San Anton’s Cerro Del Gallo project looks like a safe and successful bet for the future.