Customer Case Study: Soil Geochemistry by pXRF at the Sonora Project, Mexico

With minimal sample preparation and relatively low costs, First Mining Finance Corporation (FMF) chose portable XRF (pXRF) due to its rapid analysis, reliability, and suitability for testing soils.

Their objective was threefold: to quickly evaluate large prospective areas mostly covered by alluvium; to prioritize exploration objectives; and to discard sterile areas using reliable methods. While traditional analytical methods may be slow and costly, pXRF results served to quickly outline the extension of mineralized zones and distinguish anomalous areas under alluvium, at a reasonable cost.

Assay Costs

• 20,000 samples surveyed across 3 projects.
• Average of 4,000 XRF samples/month (FMF team capable of 8,000–9,000/month based on one person and one XRF unit if testing samples in the project office).
• pXRF tests cost FMF approx. $4/sample, including monthly rental and personnel; adding sampling and processing, the total cost is $12/sample.
• Test costs represent approximately a one-third to one-fifth of traditional wet chemical analysis at commercial labs.

Time and Project Costs

• The immediate results provided by pXRF give management the ability to make timely, confident decisions so they can better plan project activities. One such example is enabling on-site active staff and contractors to remain on site to fill in anomalies or extend sampling where necessary with no downtime, demobilization, or travel costs.

FMF used pXRF on three Sonoran projects

1. Miranda Project: Covers over 16,000 hectares (ha) within the Sonora-Mojave Meashear gold belt (SMM), 50 km SE from the Herradura Mine. The target is a potentially open-pit, leachable, orogenic, structurally controlled gold system with gold-arsenic (Au-As) signatures and local lead-tungsten-bismuth (Pb-W-Bi) association.
2. Socorro Project: Covers almost 40,000 ha located NW of El Chanate Mine. Targets include both bulk open-pit heap leachable Au deposits and high-grade Au mesothermal veins in high-angle structures.
3. San Ricardo Gold Project: Located in North Central Sonora, the project covers over 37,000 ha with historic mines and multiple Au targets, including epithermal veins and possible porphyry style deposits. Preliminary drilling reported intercepts 1 to 2.3 m of 13 – 23 g/t Au.

Before the samples are analyzed, they are sieved with #20, #35, and #80 mesh. The #80 fraction is used for pXRF. When analysis is initiated, a Daily Log report is completed that includes the QA/QC. In this daily report, the pulps analyzed by day, duplicates, re-splits, targets, standard, and internal calibrations of the pXRF equipment are controlled. Internal calibration is the resolution of the analyzer at 143 eV. An XRF Daily Sample Log report of normal, duplicate, and re-split analyses is also completed where the label of the number of the pulps is recorded in a consecutive and orderly manner.

The analysis time for each pulp, blank, standard, duplicate, and re-split is 2 beams × 30 sec for a total of 60 seconds per pulp analysis using the Soil Mode factory calibration. XRF results were compared to ICP-MS assays, and the correlation between the two (80 to 90%) was excellent.

Target 1: The first target is stockwork granite in the central part of the property (60 m at 0.18g/tAu, in the sole outcrop that goes undercover toward the West. Individual samples vary from 0.1 to 0.36 g/t Au). As, Pb, and Zn anomalies form an envelope 2 km long by 1 km wide.

Target 2: The second target is >2 km long shear zone in meta-sediments in the northern part of the property, where 9 samples assay 0.75 to 2.6 g/t Au. There is a soil geochemical anomaly 1 km long by 500 m wide that correlates with the shear zone and gold mineralization.