Abacus Mineral And Mining Group (ammg) Canadian Acquisition

March 22, 2011 - PRLog -- The purchase price for New Mine was $127 million (Canadian dollars) or £80 million, the mine has proven REE deposits and a spokes person for AMMG said this is a fantastic opportunity for AMMG to expand its supply to foreign markets especially with the new restrictions coming into force in China over the exports of Rare Earth Elements.
The total of the acquisition costs and the capital and refurbishment expenditures to bring the mine back into commercial production at a production rate of about 12000 tons of REE annually are estimated by AMMG management at $175 million (Canadian Dollars). AMMG says it is in the process of arranging its ongoing financing requirements.

According to technical reports the area of the mine contains approximately 26 million tons of REE resources, In addition to the major rare-earth-element targets, the property contains important gold exploration targets. A revival and recent refinements of the Alkaline-Igneous gold-exploration model, coupled with the strong gold market, have renewed and intensified gold-exploration interest in the property.

The property has a well-documented, hydrothermally altered and mineralized system with rock types, minerals and structures that match major features of the Alkaline-Igneous gold-exploration model. Past exploration efforts paid little attention to the potential for the deeper-seated, high-grade gold deposits targeted by this model. The property exposes the upper levels of a mineralized alkaline-igneous intrusive-complex, which is very similar to the Cripple Creek, Colorado complex. The Cripple Creek alkaline-igneous intrusive complex hosts a deposit that has produced more than 21 million ounces of gold. Some key aspects of this gold-exploration model and the similarities between the property and Cripple Creek are as follows:

• At the property, many rock-chip samples, collected by a variety of major companies over the last 30 years, carry gold values in excess of one gram per ton. Historically, the highest grade of these samples assayed over 0.41 ounces of gold per ton. (These numbers are not reliable as they have not been verified since promulgation of NI 43-101 standards.)

• Wide areas with strong (≥100 parts per billion or ppb gold) and mid-level (50 to 99 ppb gold) gold anomalies in rock-chip and soil samples.

• Gold mineralization, which is structurally controlled and closely associated with large-scale potassium feldspar-pyrite (± carbonate) metasomatic alteration.

• Veinlets and wall rocks containing disseminated rare-earth-element minerals and apatite crystals with rims enriched in rare-earth elements.

• Other anomalous elements that characterize mineralization in the complexes, which include potassium, tellurium, arsenic, antimony, molybdenum, barium and strontium.

• The properties alkaline-igneous rocks, which are dominated by phonolitic and trachytic sills, dikes, and plugs (as well as numerous related late-stage intrusions and intrusive breccia bodies) could represent the upper levels of an alkaline-igneous system that is similar to that exposed at Cripple Creek.

Anomalous gold values are prevalent wherever the intrusive breccias and carbonatites occur. Hecla located six gold targets and determined that there was good potential for expanding the gold resource. The gold-bearing East and West heterolithic intrusive breccia zones were originally discovered by FMC and delineated by Hecla. They are approximately 300 metres apart on the surface; but there are indications that they converge at depth. The rock is vuggy and silicified with local sericite-clay zones. Vugs are coated with iron oxides, pyrite, jarosite, opal and traces of barite. Gold values, ranging from 0.01 to 0.15 ounces of gold per short ton are probably associated with disseminated pyrite.

A third type of target for the Project is the copper mineralization intersected by drill-hole WBD-5l. This drill hole intersected a fenite-altered trachyte porphyry with a sulfide-rich matrix of chalcopyrite-pyrrhotite-calcite (3.5% copper over one 10-metre intersection). Carbonatite-hosted copper deposits, such as the Palabora deposit in South Africa (700 million tons averaging 0.68% copper), provide the exploration model.

The New Elk Coal assets include a separating plant with a designed production capacity of 15000 tons, product silos and rail load-out, buildings, railway right of way, surface real estate, mining equipment, conveyor systems, electrics, underground workings with mine portal access from the plant site, mine permit and mining waste dump.
AMMG management are proceeding with bringing the mine back into commercial production without delay.