Without any official news, Zenyatta Ventures shareprice skyrocketed almost 60%. Meanwhile it awaits results from drilling on a new graphite discovery.
Author: Kip Keen
Posted: Friday , 30 Mar 2012
HALIFAX, NS (MINEWEB) –
Over the past two days, trading in Zenyatta Ventures (TSX-V: ZEN) – a newcomer to the graphite exploration game in Ontario, Canada – went from sleepy to hyper. Until Wednesday’s open, daily trading volume of Zenyatta stock averaged 57,000 over the past 16 trading days. Though it had no news to report, that started to change on Wednesday. Zenyatta’s shares climbed 20 percent to C$0.18 on trading volume over a million, about a twenty-fold increase relative to its daily average over the past few weeks.
And on Thursdayn Zenyatta shares sky-rocketed. As of presstime – with still no news to report – Zenyatta was up 58 percent to C$0.29 on a blistering 4.6 million in trading volume.
Graphite – for which Zenyatta recently started exploring near Hearst, Ontario – is undoubtedly the powder setting off Zenyatta shares. Back in early January Zenyatta noted it had drilled a compelling intercept with numerous broad intervals showing significant graphite in a breccia pipe, what it now calls the Albany graphite deposit. Zenyatta highlighted eight of these intercepts, with as much as 68 metres @ 4.2 percent carbon starting about 113 metres downhole. The other intercepts graded between about two and five percent carbon over widths from about five to 50 metres.
At the time the news did not register on Zenyatta shares which were trading around the C$0.15 mark. It did at Zenyatta, which quickly sent samples of the Albany graphite core to a mineralogist at Lakehead University in Ontario for study.
In late February Zenyatta said the results looked positive, with fine to coarse sized flakes and graphite accounting for almost all the reported carbon. This was good news for Zenyatta as it is the coarser-sized flakes of graphite that catch a premium on the graphite market. Thus Zenyatta took the next logical steps. It would drill more, it said, and it would contract SGS Lakefield, an independent consulting company, to test the core samples further to get a sense of how amenable Albany graphite might be to extraction and processing. Those results are expected in May or June.
Around Mid-March Zenyatta started drilling the deposit to test girth. Zenyatta has reason to believe it might be sizeable as it had defined the target as a particularly strong electromagnetic anomaly some 1,400 metres by 800 metres. In a stylized long section on its website Zenyatta shows the deposit as a deep, 1,400-metre-long breccia pipe with a graphite matrix. Drilling will go at this picture with a finer brush.
Zenyatta has said it would drill 4,000 metres in the breccia pipe and that results would be out within a few weeks. That was March 15, some two weeks ago. Has the ticking clock on imminent drilling results caught investor attention? It may be. As of presstime Zenyatta President and CEO Aubrey Eveleigh could not be reached for comment.
Whatever the case, Zenyatta now stands as another example of the hot market for graphite stories. As previously mentioned in these pages, investors look to be clamouring to find graphite investment vehicles and have been willing to pay a premium – as was the case in a recent private placement by Flinders Resources (TSX-V: FDR), another graphite-focused junior. Graphite prices have burgeoned in recent years as it has become apparent that the growing battery industry especially will need large amounts of high purity graphite.
Source: http://www.mineweb.com/mineweb/view/mineweb/en/page103118?oid=148474&sn=Detail&pid=102055
Tags: #graphitestocks, #mining, $TSXV, Zenyatta Ventures