News

March 02, 2009

Stratex Is Getting Ready To Take Another Shot At Hitting The Big Time In Turkey

By Alastair Ford

With due respect to geophysics, geochemistry, stratigraphy, and to all the other branches of geology and general science that explorationists call to their aid, from a money perspective the world of exploration is still something of a hit and miss affair. In the end, if you’re not sure if you have something or you haven’t, there’s no substitute for sticking a drill hole down into the ground, pulling up the rock and sending it off for analysis. And then repeating the process again, and again, and again. With the backlogs that built up during the boom times slowly clearing, the assay labs will tell you soon enough if it’s a hit or a miss, and then you can either find further funds for additional work, or move on.

For Turkish-focused gold explorer Stratex, though, life hasn’t worked out so simply. One way of summarizing progress to date might be to say that the drill results at the company’s Altintepe and Inlice projects have shown them both to be something of a pair of curate’s eggs. Or to put it another way, there’s gold there, and the grades are decent enough, but at just 570,000 ounces between the two projects, there’s not that much of it. Is that, then, a hit or a miss? Well, if you’re Newmont or...