Prospector, mining companies excited about minerals discovery near Saint John

Drivers speed by a wall of rock on Highway 1 in the Prince of Wales area outside Saint John, an unremarkable part of the landscape on the stretch of road that heads west toward St. Stephen.

But not longtime minerals prospector Rob Murray, who sees the peach-coloured vein that runs down the 30-foot rock wall from an outcrop of trees at the top.

As part of his decades-long “chase” for potentially valuable deposits, he sees the tell-tale signs of copper, silver, gold and critical elements like antimony and rhenium.

“What's nice about this is there's all kinds of … primary copper minerals that companies chase after,” Murray said, as he chipped away at a section of the rock with a hand tool to remove small samples.

“So when a prospector sees that kind of a thing occurring in this type of mineralization, they get a little bit excited.”

Murray secured mineral rights to a 100-square-kilometre area and is working with Australia-based Riversgold Limited and B.C.-based AIS Resources on the potential for what’s called an “iron oxide copper-gold," or IOCG, deposit that could one day become a large mining operation.

The potential development of a mine is more than 15 years away, according to Murray, and so far only involves him and junior mining companies.

But that long journey — and long shot, because most mineral finds don’t result in actual mines — begins with the discovery of surface-level minerals like this.

“It always starts off with a prospector,” said AIS CEO Marc Enright-Morin. Murray "kept driving along this highway and was always questioning himself about what that was. He stopped, took a sample and here we are today.”

At surface level, Enright-Morin is encouraged by what has been discovered so far; what they consider to be high-grade samples of a range of minerals that make up IOCG deposits.

These kinds of finds are valuable for a number of reasons, said Enright-Morin, Murray and UNB earth sciences Prof. David Lentz.

They contain a range of minerals so they’re not as vulnerable as single-mineral mines with a commodity price that can go up and down.

They have minerals like copper that are always in demand for the electrification process, and rare earth minerals like antimony and rhenium that are important to the defence industry, which will continue to grow with countries like Canada increasing spending in the coming years.

Enright-Morin, Murray and Lentz all cite the Olympic Dam in Australia, one of the world's largest deposits of copper, uranium, and gold, when they talk about the large-scale potential for an IOCG mining operation here.

Lentz has seen the early results and said there is potential for an IOCG deposit in the area under investigation, but expectations need to be tempered until a significant discovery is made.

“If we ever did have something like this, it would be a game changer in North America and definitely in New Brunswick,” Lentz said. “But the thing is, this is always [a] pie-in-the-sky type of thing.”

Lentz said that’s true of all findings in the early stages of exploration. He said one in 2,000 eventually become mines; Murray is even more conservative, putting the number at one in 10,000.

Enright-Morin is optimistic, yet pragmatic about the potential for a significant discovery of copper and other valuable minerals here.

“When you look at IOCG deposits around the globe, they tend to be on the large side,” he said.

“Our biggest commodity, if we were to discover something, would be copper. The gold numbers are amazing as well … and then obviously all the other metals. So it could be large, it could be nothing, but all indications from what we look at, it looks interesting."

Murray found the initial mineral sample at a Little Lepreau quarry on a tip from another prospector. He had a sample tested and it came back with high numbers for copper, silver and antimony.

He then did a wider investigation of the area, which is when he also found the mineral samples on the rock face on Highway 1 in the Prince of Wales area.

He secured the involvement of Australia-based Riversgold, which then engaged AIS from B.C. in the project. They have a permit for drilling as far down as 2,000 metres, which they will do in the next few months after more surface-area investigations to find the right spots to drill.

“I'm looking forward to what they're going to discover,” Murray said. “I think there's something significant along this particular trend and it only takes one IOCG deposit to put a whole country on the map, just like one that put Australia on the map.”

AIS will begin drilling in the next six months or so. As a junior mining company, it does exploratory work and then brings in a larger company if a significant deposit is found. It can take 15 years or more to get a mine into operation.

“We make the discovery, we show some size, we show the economics work,” he said. “And then most of the time you're going to see one of these majors come in and take it up.”

Murray, who started out as a “weekend prospector” in the 1980s but now does this work full time, was out searching for minerals recently and spoke with a man out for a ride on his ATV.

He asked Murray what he was doing, and the man said his son wants to work in the mining industry and would prefer to stay in New Brunswick.

The veteran prospector said this keeps him motivated about the potential for existing and new mining projects in the province.

“I'm looking forward to getting some of these deposits back into production and discovering more new deposits,” he said. “We're going to create a lot of employment for our young people.

“I'll never stop this. This, I'll do until I take my last breath.”