Nov 17 2010
Excelsior Mining Corp. has announced details of the $2.5 million Phase I program planned on the Gunnison Copper Property located within the copper porphyry belt in southern Arizona.
Gunnison contains a National Instrument (NI) 43-101 inferred resource of 4.77 billion pounds of copper which remains open for expansion.
The 2011 Phase I program will consist of 10,000 meters (m) of drilling and preliminary hydrological and metallurgical tests. The program is scheduled to commence in the second week of January and is expected to take 4 months. An updated resource estimate will be carried out following the completion of this drill program.
Approximately 7,000 m of drilling will be targeted towards upgrading the resource from the inferred to the indicated category. Management expects that approximately 80% of the oxide resource will be upgraded. The remaining 3,000 m of drilling will test exploration targets, with the goal of increasing the global copper resource.
Over two-thirds of the copper occurs as oxide copper, which has the potential to be mined using in-situ recovery (ISR) methods. ISR is a low cost, environmentally sound process of extracting metals from deposits and has been commercially used in Arizona to extract copper. A mild solution that is approximately 99% water, and can be compared to typical household vinegar, is pumped through the injection wells to dissolve the copper. The solution then moves through the rock in a controlled manner to nearby recovery wells from which it is pumped back to the surface for processing.
Hydrological and metallurgical test work will commence in the first quarter of 2011 in order to confirm previous results that demonstrate that Gunnison can be mined using ISR.
Stephen Twyerould (Fellow of AUSIMM), President and CEO of Excelsior, and a Qualified Person as defined by National Instrument 43-101, has reviewed and is responsible for the technical information contained in this news release.
Source: Excelsior Mining Corp.