# Bactech Environmental (BAC.c)



## superstar (Oct 22, 2016)

Bolivia Tailings Project Summary
Telamayu, Bolivia

In February 2012, Ross Orr travelled to La Paz, Bolivia, and met with BacTech's representative for South America, Oscar Alvarado Sr. Our goal was to visit the Telamayu tailings near the town of Atocha in southwest Bolivia.

Telamayu is a mill site that has been processing material from local mines for 100 years. What strikes you at first sight, is the amount of existing infrastructure, albeit somewhat dated. The presence of a power substation and an operating railroad offer a great head start on any plans we may have for the area. In addition, there is a local, trained workforce and considerable amounts of silver, copper and tin. The tailings are controlled by COMIBOL (Corporacin Minera de Bolivia), the state-owned mining company for Bolivia.

Although there are two stockpiles, our work focused on the tailings pile next to the old mill. We noticed copper had been dissolved in some surface water on the tails, illustrating the presence of acid from the sulphides oxidizing (see picture).

Back in 2010, COMIBOL employees manually dug 4, 10 meter holes and material was bagged at one meter intervals down to the bottom of the tailings pile. They literally used shovels and ladders to go down to the 10 meter level. This material had been sitting in the old mill housing for seven years and provided easy access for BacTech to obtain a 200 kg sample.

In May 2012, we enlisted the services of SGS Bolivia S.A. to oversee the sampling of some 2,000 bags from the exercise described in the previous paragraph. A pipe was used to extract a sample from every bag and a larger sample of 200 kg was created. This sample was bagged and secured at site before making its way to Lima, Peru. From there, the samples were shipped to Inspectorate Exploration and Mining Services Ltd. in Vancouver, Canada, where assays of the material were produced.

The results we received were extremely positive. What we could ascertain were the following;

1. In the past, the mill was set up to recover silver from very high head grade material of over 300 oz/t. This explains the *high level of silver, 9 oz/t*, we assayed in the tailings. As a percentage of the head grade, they only missed recovering 3% of the silver

2. The mill was set up for tin, silver and zinc recovery, which meant that the copper was passed through. This may be a result of the price of copper in the earlier years being low and of little value. The assayed *copper came back as 2.24%*. To put this in perspective, there are mines going into production today at 1/3 of this grade.

In December 2014, BacTech signed a Term Sheet with Pala Investments of Zug, Switzerland. Pala is a fund that invests globally in mining and mining-related projects such as Telamayu. The Term Sheet envisions a US$10M debt instrument which finances construction of both a gravity/flotation circuit and a copper cementation plant. The products to be produced will be a silver concentrate for export, a copper precipitate, and tin.

As of May 24, 2016, BacTech and COMIBOL have signed an Association Contract for the project. In exchange for providing the capital for the project, the construction and the operations for the plant, BacTech will receive 100% of the cash flow from the project for 18 months, or until such time as the debt against the project is retired, or whichever comes first. After completing the repayment of the debt, the project splits into a 55/45 ownership of the cash flow in COMIBOL's favour. BacTech has hired Jose Cordova, a former President of COMIBOL (see BacTech news release dated April 15, 2015), as the in-country manager for Bolivia.

Shortly, BacTech will engage Leduc Drilling of La Paz to begin drilling to provide material for assaying and gravity/flotation testwork. Alongside, Bumigeme Engineering will begin work on a NI 43-101 report on the contained metal in the tailings. This Phase 1, as it is called, is a technical evaluation of the project and will lead to Phase 2, which is the construction phase.


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