The playbook — gold · October 22, 2026
Roger grows to 1.39 Moz gold — all of it lowest-confidence inferred
Auriginal's Chibougamau porphyry jumps 777% in ounces, but every one sits in the inferred bin at 0.54 g/t, and the best new holes aren't counted yet.
Auriginal Mining put a number on its Roger project in Quebec’s Chibougamau camp: 1.39 million ounces of gold, all of it inferred — the least certain of the three confidence bins miners use. The average grade is 0.54 grams per tonne, meaning every tonne of rock carries about half a gram of gold, roughly a sixtieth of an ounce. That is a low-grade, bulk-tonnage deposit — the kind you mine in a big open pit by moving a lot of rock cheaply. The ounce count jumped 777% from the old 2018 figure.
Here is the mechanism behind that jump. Part of it is new rock, but a lot of it is accounting. The estimate uses a 0.22 g/t cut-off — the minimum grade worth counting — and a gold price of US$3,750 an ounce, well above spot. Drop the cut-off and raise the price, and more rock qualifies as ore. At a stricter 0.45 g/t cut-off the deposit shrinks to 957,000 ounces. The 297,000 ounces that were classified as indicated in 2018 — a step up in confidence — were all pushed back down to inferred here. Notably, the strongest new holes aren’t in this model at all: AUR-26-07 cut 125.3 metres at 0.67 g/t (including 20 m at 1.94), and AUR-26-12 cut 45.5 metres at 1.05. The release says 2026 drilling extended mineralization 700 m to the southwest, 400 m northeast and more than 150 m deeper, stretching the traced zone to about 1.4 km of strike; the company reports the deeper intercepts in downhole metres (AUR-26-10’s deep hit: 603.7 to 628.0 m downhole), with vertical depth not derivable from the release’s collar and dip data as disclosed. Those metres feed a later estimate, not this one. CEO Peter Cashin found the Strange Lake rare-earth deposit in 2009; his two prior public companies reached discovery and study stage but neither produced metal. The stock gained 20% over three months while gold slipped 1.4% and the junior index GDXJ barely moved — a company-specific move.
Watch three things. All reported intervals are core lengths; true widths are estimated at roughly 65% of core length. Assays are still pending from remaining Phase 2 holes, including AUR-26-20, where drillers logged visible gold. The full NI 43-101 technical report backing this estimate is due within 45 days of the October 22 release. The company targets the next resource update — the one that folds in the good 2026 holes — for the end of Q2 2027. Caveats stay front and centre: the whole resource is inferred, it leans hard on the cut-off and gold-price assumptions, some historical holes lack QA/QC data, and the 32.6 g/t hit in AUR-26-04A spans just 1.2 metres — an isolated sliver, not the deposit.