Mar 19 2013
BacTech Environmental Corporation ("BacTech" or the "Company", is pleased to announce that it has awarded a drilling contract to Rodren Drilling Ltd. of Winnipeg, Manitoba, for its Anderson Lake winter drill program. The program will begin today. All permits for the drill program have been received.
On February 12, 2013, BacTech Manitoba Corporation signed a Memorandum of Understanding ("MOU") with HudBay Minerals Inc. ("Hudbay") (TSX:HBM)(NYSE:HBM) for the Anderson Lake tailings site located in Snow Lake, Manitoba. Anderson Lake hosts tailings from ten past-producing mines in the area. Pursuant to the MOU, BacTech is to conduct a drilling program to obtain samples from the Anderson Lake tailings.
The purpose of the drill program is to quantify the grade of gold and silver in the tails, as well as establish an oxide gold/sulphide gold ratio with special attention to refractory type sulphides for the tailings. The Company expects to drill 25 holes over an area of 728 sq meters at 100 meter intervals.
The tailings were created through deposition from a number of local mines including, but not limited to, the Chisel, Photo, Stall, Spruce Point, Osborne, Rod, and Anderson Mines. Assay results from the drill core will be reported once received. BacTech is interested in the identification of refractory sulphide ounces as possible feed for the Company's bioleach plant to be built in Snow Lake.
Hudbay has over 60 years of mining and metal production in the Snow Lake area. The Snow Lake-Flin Flon "Greenstone Belt" of Manitoba and Saskatchewan is one of the most prospective areas in the world for volcanogenic massive sulphide ("VMS") polymetallic deposits. It is also the largest paleoproterozoic VMS district in the world (Symes et al, 1999) and the richest Greenstone Belt in Canada per square kilometre (Franklin, 1995). BacTech continues to investigate other opportunities in the Greenstone Belt that have potential to be additional feeds for the proposed Snow Lake bioleach plant.
The Company also announces that, pursuant to the stock option plan, the Board of Directors has approved the issuance of 750,000 options to purchase common shares of the Company to certain directors, employees and consultants of the Company. The exercise price of the options is $0.20. They are subject to a four-month hold and have a term of 5 years. The total number of outstanding options under the Company's plan is now 4,150,000, or approximately 8.5% of the outstanding shares.