- Group Eleven Resources continues to expand its Ballywire discovery, with recent drilling extending mineralization to 3.2 kilometres.
- Strong silver results, including intercepts grading up to 4,200 grams per tonne silver, are increasing investor attention on the project.
- A recently completed C$12 million bought-deal financing has expanded the company’s planned drill program from 20,000 metres to approximately 70,000 metres.
Ireland’s mining renaissance meets a growing silver story
What if one of the most exciting silver discoveries in Europe isn’t a traditional silver jurisdiction at all? Today we’re checking back in with Group Eleven Resources (TSX-V: ZNG/OTCQB: GRLVF), a company advancing its flagship project in Ireland where recent drilling continues to return, impressive intercepts of zinc, led, copper, and increasingly significant silver mineralization.
This article is disseminated in partnership with Group Eleven Resources. It is intended to inform investors and should not be taken as a recommendation or financial advice.
At the same time, Island’s mining environment appears to be strengthening with renewed focus on domestic mineral development, permitting reforms, and efforts to bring historic mines back into production. Joining Ricki to talk through all of this and the latest developments is Bart Jaworski, CEO of Group Eleven Resources.
Watch the video above or read the full transcript below, and share your thoughts with the community.
Group Eleven expands high-grade discovery in Ireland
Ricki: Let’s start with the bigger picture. Island has a long history of mining success, and now we’re seeing renewed support for the sector through permitting reforms and efforts to restart historic operations. What makes Islands such an attractive jurisdiction today, and how does your project fit into that evolving mining landscape?
Bart: Ricki, I would start off by saying great rocks obviously, excellent infrastructure, very good common sense, mining code, pretty much a pro-business stable politics in the country.
Of course, with the backdrop of the European Mining Renaissance and specifically the Critical Raw Materials Act, the CRMA and paired in with that, I guess is the circular economy initiatives that are very much present. And then of late, specifically in Ireland, we had the formation of the Irish Minerals Fund, which is a spinoff from the Irish Sovereign Wealth Fund.
Its mandate is to fast track Irish mining projects, especially in the realm of critical metals. That’s a big development. Then more specifically, even yet, just 50 kilometers away from our Ballywire discovery, we have Quinton Hennigh and San Cristobal’s restart of the Galmoy historic mine, which is also a new development.
There you see San Cristobal investing money alongside with this new Irish minerals fund. A lot of things going on in the country.
Ricki: And turning to the drill results, you’ve continued to report strong intercepts containing multiple minerals, including zinc, lead, copper and silver. What did these recent results tell you about the scale and potential of the system you’re exploring?
Bart: We’ve had some amazing drill results over the last three and a half years or so, especially lately with at the beginning of this year, really 50 meters of 10% zinc and lead, and about 330 grams per ton of silver and about 0.4% copper. In that we also just extended our pierced mineralization by 600 meters from about 2.6 kilometers to 3.2 kilometers.
Now we’re drilling on the far reaches of our six kilometer trend. Not only do we have a 3.2 kilometer pierced zone of mineralization, but outside of that we have a six kilometer prospective trend. Within that, is the 3.2 kilometers.
We’re spreading our wings and we’re drilling along the six kilometers now. More specifically, the latest results show that the southwest of the Ballywire discovery itself has shown some signs of life.
This is potentially a second Southwest trend of high-grade mineralization. We’ve had a step out or two now along that direction, which is showing us the trend was further south than we were originally modeling.
There’s one sort of going more east west and there seems to be one developing which is more southwest oriented. That’s another exciting prospect specifically for us. And of course we’re talking about the last few months here. We’ve been talking more and more about the emergence of parallel trends and perhaps most importantly.
The emergence of what appears to be a copper, silver root system to the zinc system on top. That’s also a very exciting development for us of late.
Ricki: And a lot of investor attention has been drawn to the silver component of these discoveries. How significant are the silver intercepts you’re seeing and how, and has silver become a bigger part of the story than you’re originally anticipated?
Bart: We’ve really been hitting it out of the park in terms of silver, especially recently we had up to 4,200 grams per ton silver. Now we typically get between 50 and 150 grams per ton, which is fantastic. But that’s really come to the for now with the development or the discovery of this deeper copper silver zone.
We’re definitely seeing some pockets of very high-grade silver. Then if you look at the Ballywire discovery on a silver only basis, not a silver equivalent basis, but ignoring the zinc and the lead and the copper, just looking at the silver, we have the bones of a two to three kilometer long silver system defined by, a hundred gram meter contour lines. We have that we’ve been showing that slide over the last six months or so in the company.
It is for sure a very, very interesting if you plot up all the drill hits that we’ve had at the Ballywire discovery since we made the discovery three and a half years ago and plotted up in terms of gross metal value per metal, you see that silver is the majority of the gross metal value.
We can certainly say we have a silver discovery on our hands here, which obviously makes things a lot more interesting. There’s a much wider audience for silver and copper than there is zinc. It’s definitely a welcome development.
Ricki: The company has also recently completed a $12 million bought deal financing. How does that strengthen your position and what are the key objectives for the expanded job program moving forward?
Bart: It was a huge boost for us, that $12 million with Coremark and Beacon, a huge help because it basically took our funded drill program of 20,000 meters beforehand and boosted it to 70,000 meters more or less.
The majority of that is going to be spent on Ballywire, of course, but we also get to roll up our sleeves on a project, which has been here too, for capital starved, and that’s Carrickittle West at Stonepark. And we’re finally going to have about 15,000 meters ahead of us to really roll up our sleeves on that project as well as an add on to Ballywire. And of course, most of that drilling is going to go towards Ballywire.
And like I said, we’re really going to focus in on expansion drilling, further expansion. We’ve been expanding drilling doing expansion drilling for the last three and a half years, but now we really get to go to the A, the B and the D Gravity anomalies along that six kilometer trend and you know, hopefully find the, a lot more high grade mineralization.
Ricki: And finally, bar, as you look ahead over the next 12 months, what milestones should investors be watching for as Group Eleven continues to advance the project?
Bart: Well, we’ve got 70,000 meters of drilling over the next two years, as I mentioned. As we speak right now, Ricki, we have 15 holes in progress right now as we speak. Those are holes that are either being drilled or already drilled and being processed, logged, sampled, et cetera, being thrown in the lab.
So there’s a lot of news flow coming from here to December and then again into all of next year. There’s, remember, there’s no seasonality in Ireland in terms of we can drill year round. Really the focus is going to be on expansion drilling at Ballywire and seeing how big Ballywire is.
We have a lot of discovery, a lot of testing of targets and a lot of exciting work over the next 24 months or so. Certainly, on that, and of course, next door to Ballywire is our Stonepark project, which we’re also doing work on. We currently are in the program right now. We just started that drill program as we mentioned, the last press release or two press releases ago now.
And then we’ll continue that and we’ll update the market when the results come in on that as well.
Ricki: Well, Bart, thank you so much for joining us today and updating us on the progress at Group Eleven Resources.
Bart: Thanks so much, Ricki, appreciate it.
Ricki: For more information, you can visit www.groupelevenresources.com I’m Ricki Lee and this has been The Capital Compass. Thank you for watching, and I’ll see you again next time.