Sunstone Metals sees potential for 10Moz at Bramaderos project in Ecuador

Sunstone Metals’ (ASX: STM) discovery hopes received a further boost this week with the announcement of high-grade results from the Bramaderos project in Ecuador.

“Sunstone is very much a discovery opportunity,” managing director Malcolm Norris told the Resources Rising Stars Summer Series in Brisbane.

The company has two “giant” projects, Bramaderos in the south and El Palmar in the north.

Bramaderos contains the Limon epithermal gold-silver discovery.

Yesterday, Sunstone reported new trenching results from Limon with grades of up to 16 grams per tonne gold and 376g/t silver.

Mr Norris said the results provided further evidence that Limon hosted multiple epithermal centres.

“Everywhere we trench, everywhere we sample, we find gold and silver mineralisation,” he said.

The trenching results were spread across a 1.7km by 700m area.

“This is a very large area of mineralisation,” Mr Norris said.

Resource estimate coming

Mr Norris said he often got asked when Sunstone would define a resource estimate for Limon.

“We will once we get a better handle on the scale of this opportunity.”

He pointed to the exploration target of 0.9-1.7 million ounces of gold equivalent as “a guide”.

Bramaderos already has a porphyry resource of 2.7Moz of gold equivalent and a porphyry exploration target of 3.3-8.6Moz of gold equivalent.

“We have line of sight to an endowment of 10Moz,” Mr Norris said.

Ecuador concerns misplaced

Ecuador has been in the headlines for all the wrong reasons lately due to civil unrest.

Mr Norris explained this had mostly been due to a government crackdown on drug traffickers using the country as a route to transport drugs from Colombia and Peru.

He welcomed the government’s action and reiterated that Ecuador was pro-mining, as evidenced by the presence of all of the major miners in the country.

“We don’t see there’s a sovereign risk – it’s a great place to invest,” Mr Norris said.