Mineralisation
Gold and silver mineralisation at Cap Oeste is hosted by the northwest trending Cap Oeste Breccia Fault, which dips 75° to 90° to the southwest.

The drilling to date has defined a high-grade shoot, approximately 130 m long and 12 m to 15 m wide, situated in the interpreted southeast extension of the Bonanza Fault. The high-grade ore shoot pitches steeply to the west north-west over an approximate 120 m vertical interval, extending from 135 m to 255 m vertically below surface as currently defined by the drilling to date. Mapping, trench sampling and drilling has confirmed that the high-grade shoot is overlain by a broader (e.g. 20 m thick) zone of more diffuse lower grade, high Ag/Au ratio mineralisation and trace element anomalism.

The highest-grade Au-Ag mineralisation is hosted by a distinctive suite of sinuous to weakly bifurcating breccia, comprising argillic altered characteristically rounded fragments of volcanic host rock in a sulphide rich milled breccia matrix of fine-grained grey quartz, illite, and carbonaceous material. Precious metals occur as native metal, alloys and sulphides, in close association with base metal sulphides, pyrite, and arsenopyrite. These zones of very high-grade Au-Ag mineralisation are referred to by PGD as ‘hypogene’ mineralisation, or more commonly ‘COSE’ style mineralisation, as a reference to the nearby COSE au-ag mineralisation style to the south-east of Cap Oeste.

PGD geolo ........

The Cap-Oeste Project area is located in the central portion of Santa Cruz Province, in the Department of Rio Chico, southern Argentina

In 2014, an initial open pit design with a 24 month mine life was selected by PGD for development with the option to increase the project mine life to six years with the development of the underground production.

The Company has selected a low cost initial open pit design with heap leach processing facilities with the option to increase the project mine life to six years with the development of the two underground projects at Cap-Oeste and COSE.

The pit optimisation was carried out at a price of $1,300/oz Au and $20/oz Ag and has resulted in an increase in the current open-pit life for Cap-Oeste from two to three years, with the pit now forecast for depletion in Q3 2019 with a total ore production of 2.03Mt @ 2.99g/t Au and 138g/t Ag for a total recoverable estimated production of 136,000 oz of Au and 3.2M oz of Ag, equating to 186,800 oz AuEq. Pursuant to the pit optimisation, the proposal is to increase the size of the pit to mine the ore previously delineated for the Cap-Oeste underground pit, resulting in the overall material to be moved over the life of the mine increasing from 7.2Mt to 25.2Mt, which will also increase the strip ratio from 3.7 to 11.44 and the ore being mined increasing from 1.55Mt to 2.03Mt. In order to mine the increased material, additional fleet will be required to increase the mont ........

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