We last checked out progress of the big 400,000m New Found Gold (NFG) drill program at its Queensway project back on September 1st in the post “Tracking the New Found Gold (NFG) 2022 drill program” and with a decent number of assay results and updates since then, including one today, it’s time to update on progress. Here’s a table:
With today’s release, NFG reports that 78% of the 400,000m program is in-box though for the last four NRs, they’ve stopped telling us how many rigs are turning so maybe the rig count has dropped from the peak 14. However and as this chart shows…
….there’s a growing backlog of assays pending on drilled core. Yes, it’s a big program (and it has to be in order to burn all the flow-through cash in time) but even with six assay results NRs since our last update, that’s a significant lag. For context, here’s another chart:
Back at the start of the year NFG came in for plenty of flak (mostly from its own shareholders) due to the amount of time it was taking to get assay results back from the lab. That lag improved mid-year but as you can now see, the lag has grown compared to the overall reported drill meterage and as per today, 21.6% of assays from drilled core are still pending. Is this merely lab lag and inefficiencies that are out of NFG’s hands, or is there a little foot-dragging on the less stellar intersects going on? We’ll find out eventually.