Vizsla Silver (VZLA), as the name implies, is a silver exploration company. But don’t make the mistake of thinking this is any ordinary silver play. The company is steadily building a world-class silver resource in terms of not only size but grade, maintains Brien Lundin, editor of Gold Newsletter.
Vizsla’s 100%-owned Panuco project, located in Sinaloa, Mexico, spans 9,500 hectares and includes 35 kilometers of past workings. Although still a relatively young company, it is pursuing aggressive efforts utilizing as many as eight drill rigs and has already completed over 250,000 meters of drilling.
The result is 104.7 million ounces of indicated silver-equivalent resource (at an average silver-equivalent grade of 437 g/t), plus another 114.1 million ounces of inferred silver-equivalent resource (at an average silver-equivalent grade of 491 g/t).
In short, the resource is large and high grade. And even better: It’s poised to grow much larger, with those resources representing less than 10% of the known vein strike on the property (and with new veins still being discovered).
One of the recent discoveries is the Copala structure, a vein system so large and rich that it already contributes about half of the total Panuco indicated resource. The average grade of the silver drilled so far at Copala is over 500 g/t silver-equivalent, and the resources are building so rapidly here because the average width of the veins is 10 meters.
So far, mineralization at Copala has been traced over 1.67 kilometers and 400 meters down dip, and remains open in all directions. What’s truly exciting from an exploration standpoint is the potential for more discoveries like Copala. While still expanding the known veins, Vizsla continues to aggressively explore for more, with three drill rigs devoted to the exploration effort.
The results being consistently achieved by the drills promise to deliver eye-popping numbers for the next resource estimate, expected in the first half of 2024. Not long after that, the company expects to produce a preliminary economic assessment. Considering the shallow, high-grade, and thick mineralization, the economics for Panuco should sing.
There’s a powerful argument for much higher gold prices over the coming months. Silver naturally leverages gold, silver equities leverage silver, and junior silver exploration companies provide even more leverage on top of all of that. Vizsla offers all of this, plus the relatively lower-risk of a proven, large-scale silver resource.
And one gets all of that in a company that’s still trading near the lower end of its 52-week range. With appeal for both value investors and exploration speculators, Vizsla is the one-stop-shop silver play.
