Surge Copper Corp. (TSXV: SURG) has commenced a Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA) on the Berg Project located in central British Columbia.
The company has engaged Ausenco Engineering Canada Inc. to lead the PEA which will utilize an updated mineral resource estimate to be completed by Tetra Tech Canada Inc. The PEA is anticipated to be completed during the second calendar quarter of 2023.
Highlights
- Project concept to outline development opportunity of a simple, stand-alone open pit mine and concentrator facility located in an easily accessible region of British Columbia which has significant existing and ongoing industrial development including multiple mines, a smelter, forest products operations, a major pipeline, and a hydroelectricity station
- Project anticipated to have a low strip ratio, and benefit from near-surface, higher-grade supergene enrichment zone material in early years
- Project design will tie into existing infrastructure including the low-to-no-carbon-emissions BC Hydro grid, and existing road networks which provide access to the Berg Project
- PEA will leverage trade-off studies completed in 2022 that identified multiple suitable tailings siting options
- Updated resource modeling plus new sample data anticipated to improve precious metals credits
- Design approach will focus on and prioritize opportunities for energy efficiency and electrification of energy-intensive activities, including use of conveyor systems, in order to reduce carbon emissions footprint
“The Berg Project represents a potentially globally unique opportunity to develop a long-life project with high outputs of metals critical for the energy transition including copper, which is critical in nearly all electrification applications, molybdenum, which is critical in large-scale geared wind turbines and gas pipelines, and silver, which is a key component in solar photovoltaic cells, located in a region with zero-carbon-emissions grid hydroelectricity, and negligible water supply issues,” CEO, Leif Nilsson, said.
“Significant effort has gone into conceptualizing Berg as an emerging Canadian critical metals project, and we are excited to be commencing this project study with our engineering consulting partners at Ausenco.”
As a precursor to, and basis for the PEA, the company engaged Ausenco in early 2022 to complete a broad set of trade-off studies focused on infrastructure opportunities and alternatives present in the Berg-Huckleberry-Ootsa district, spanning material movement technologies and logistics, electricity supply options, and tailings facility siting options.
In addition to these trade-off studies, the PEA will be anchored by extensive metallurgical testwork completed on material from the Berg deposit by G&T Metallurgical Services Ltd. (now ALS Metallurgy). These testwork programmes focused on developing a flow sheet to produce copper and molybdenum concentrates from both supergene and hypogene composite samples and demonstrated that conventional flotation processes can be used to produce marketable copper and molybdenum concentrates.
In early 2021, the company announced an updated mineral resource estimate (MRE) for the Berg deposit based on 51,662 metres of drill core across 201 diamond drill holes completed prior to 2012.
During the 2021 exploration programme, the company re-established road access to the Berg deposit, built an exploration camp, and completed 2,855 metres of drilling across nine diamond drill holes.
Historical drilling in the database from prior to 1990, representing approximately 26% of the total assay data used in the MRE, does not contain silver assay data and the MRE applies a value of zero to these missing values.
After a detailed analysis of current drilling and silver assays it is estimated that this estimation approach results in a potential underestimation of actual silver grades in the deposit.
The company is working on an improved geological model to better constrain silver domains within the deposit to rectify this issue. In addition, historical drilling at Berg was only sporadically assayed for gold, and the current MRE does not contain any estimates for gold content in the deposit.
To rectify this issue, the company completed a systematic resampling programme during the 2022 field season across approximately 5,200 historical drill core samples and 3,000 pulp samples in storage to bolster this portion of the database, and anticipates including this new data, in addition to the 2021 drilling, in the updated resource estimate to accompany the PEA.
For further information please visit: https://surgecopper.com/
