Pt 2 was originally written for my friends at the Northern Miner hence it’s not as sweary as my usual pieces. Which is a pity.
Strolling around PDAC in March, I ended up in the core shack, perusing all of the world class, upper quartile tier 1 discoveries guaranteed to become a mine one day. Tucked away at one end was Barrick’s giant Reko Diq porphyry project in western Pakistan. The photos of the parched Baluchistan desert took me back to 1997 when I spent a couple of months there, prospecting for similar systems along the Afghan border. A year later in 1998, I was involved in planning the second phase of drilling at Anglo American’s Zarshuran gold project in northern Iran and we sourced our drill rigs from Reko Diq, then owned by BHP. The first Zarshuran drill program in 1996 was a slow grinding headache, (See Part 1 here) with only 7 holes completed in 3 months. We couldn’t come to any firm conclusions about the project, so we started planning a follow up program for the summer of 1998.
We’d learned some tough lessons in Phase 1, and this time around we were going to be smarter. No more Iranian contractors. We’d use a modern, western-owned, truck mounted top-drive rig with 1,500ft capacity to drill the project. Hopefully we’d get to a technical go-no-go decision ahead of the complex legal work needed for a major mining investment in Iran. But multipurpose rigs didn’t exist in Iran, so we needed to find a western drill company ballsy enough to send one -along with experienced drillers- to Iran. Luckily, an Australian drill company -I’ll call them OzCo- had a suitable rig across the border in Pakistan at Reko Diq. The rig had finished its contract and OzCo wanted it earning revenue rather than sitting idle. OzCo’s drillers in Pakistan serviced the rig, stuck the rods and assorted widgets into shipping containers, loaded them onto flat beds and got ready to mobilise into Iran. All we had to do was drive it across the border at Taftan, fill in a few Iranian customs forms, and then drive it 1,900km cross country to northern Iran. Simple.
Continue reading “How Not to Drill A Project Pt 2”