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Barksdale Resources announced on 28 October that it had begun updating the preliminary economic assessment for its wholly owned San Javier project in Sonora, Mexico. The existing study, effective January 2024, considered a copper-only heap-leach operation using US$4.00-per-pound copper. The update will investigate adding gold recovery.
The company has analysed 187 retained drill-core reject samples for gold and is selecting material from earlier drilling for bottle-roll and column-leach tests. These tests are intended to establish recovery assumptions. Gold assays demonstrate metal in samples, but do not by themselves establish that it can be extracted economically.
AKF Mining Services will undertake the update under NI 43-101. The scope includes metallurgical work, an updated copper-gold mineral resource estimate, pit-shell and cut-off optimisation, and revised capital costs, operating costs and mine planning. Long-term consensus metal prices will replace the older copper-only pricing assumptions.
Completion is expected in the fourth quarter of 2027. Barksdale cautions that the previously discussed conceptual gold quantity is not a defined mineral resource and may not become one. The announcement starts a technical assessment; it does not establish a new gold reserve, completed feasibility study or decision to build the project.