It’s called Molybdenum – Mo is its chemical symbol -- and while it’s not among the hottest or most closely-watched of the earth’s treasures, a small Canadian mining company is making its presence felt discovering more of it in another country.
On the first day of March, Vancouver-based Creston Moly Corp. (TSX VENTURE:CMS), whether to steal some of the thunder from the phenomenally successful Olympic Winter Games that had wrapped up the night before in that city, announced the results of the first five holes of a 5,000-metre drilling program on its Molybdenum project in Sonora, Mexico.
Highlights of the drill program included an intercept of 189.05 metres at 0.091% Molybdenum including 94.55 metres at 0.150% Molybdenum. Another hole showed an intercept of 222.65 metres at 0.074% Molybdenum including 122.00 metres at 0.100% Molybdenum.
Molybdenum is a silvery metal with the sixth-highest melting point of any element. It readily forms hard, stable carbides, and for this reason is often used in high-strength steel alloys.
Mo can withstand extreme temperatures without significantly expanding or softening, thus making it useful in applications that involve intense heat, including the manufacture of aircraft parts, electrical contacts, industrial motors and filaments.
CMS is well advanced on its 5,000-metre drilling program with 11 holes (3,225 metres) now completed. Drill results will be routinely released as the assaying results are available. The drilling program is part of a $4-million work program on the El Creston deposit(s) designed to advance the project towards completion of a feasibility study.
Creston Moly Corp. was founded in 2002, and in May 2007 raised $40 million which enabled CMS to purchase a 100% interest in the Creston molybdenum deposit in Sonora State. The company completed that purchase last summer, by way of a merger with Vancouver-based Tenajon Resources Corporation.
Creston has a 100% interest in the Moly Brook property on the southern coast of Newfoundland, where Molybdenum was first discovered at in 1995 by the now defunct Royal Oak Mines Inc. while exploring for gold. Another CMS project is the 11,718-hectare Ajax Molybdenum Property in B.C. that it obtained when Creston acquired Tenajon in August.
It was just before the merger that the company’s stock hit its 52-week low in price at 8.5 cents. On the first day of October last year, that rose to 34 cents, and on the day of the announcement of the advances on the Sonora project, the price was somewhere around 27 cents.
News of the finds in Mexico could lend the company some extra octane in finding investors, who could then bring the price appreciably higher before too long.
