BENZF - Benz Mining: PhotonAssay Delivers Increase in Reported Gold and Confirms Coarse Gold

HIGHLIGHTS

• PhotonAssay analysis of 18,143 samples (from 8,500kg of coarse crushed rejects) from the 2020 drilling campaign identifies more high-grade gold Eastmain Gold Project

• Results include

  • 39% increase in the number of reportable intercepts (>0.2g/t Au) from 84 to 117

  • 80% increase in the number of high-grade intercepts (>8g/t Au) from 5 to 9

  • 85% of reportable samples returned higher gold value by PhotonAssay

• Exclusivity agreement executed with MSA laboratories which will see the first PhotonAssay facility in North America

• The agreement will enable Benz to assay 20,000 samples per month, resulting in much faster turnaround and better gold detection

• Additional 7,500kg of coarse crushed material from the 2021 drilling campaign has arrived for PhotonAssay in Perth

Toronto, Ontario--(Newsfile Corp. - November 3, 2021) - Benz Mining Corp. (TSXV: BZ) (ASX: BNZ) (the Company or Benz) is pleased to provide an update on the recently completed PhotonAssay duplicate analysis. The campaign was a success with a substantial increase in both the overall amount of gold mineralised intervals and the number of high-grade (>8g/t Au) intervals reported.

CEO Xavier Braud commented:

"PhotonAssay of material from our 2020 drilling campaign has delivered exceptional results, showing there is more gold in the system than previously reported. Despite running it on a relatively small number of samples, we can clearly see that this assay method is detecting more gold in most samples submitted. We went from 84 reportable intercepts (gold>0.2g/t) to 117. This is 39% more reportable gold than obtained from fire assay analysis.

"Out of 117 reportable samples, 99 have returned higher maximum values by PhotonAssay than by Fire Assay. This means that for 85% of samples, PhotonAssay yielded higher gold values

"In one instance, Fire Assay had returned <0.01 g/t Au and the best PhotonAssay came back at 0.7g/t Au (a >13,900% uplift). This turns a seemingly barren zone into a prospective area with strongly anomalous gold. In this instance, the 0.7g/t Au result was even flagged as heterogeneous, confirming nugget effect. This is of prime importance - the nugget effect is the main attribute of true high grade gold deposits.

"This round of analysis fulfilled our expectations with regards to the assay method and pushed us to negotiate an exclusivity agreement with MSA laboratories on the first PhotonAssay laboratory to be installed in North America.

"This new laboratory will be setup in Val D'Or, Quebec, approximately 750km from the Eastmain Project and will give Benz a much shorter turnaround time on drill core assay, solving a problem which has been impacting many explorers worldwide

"We have been fortunate that the abundance of visible gold at Eastmain has allowed us to keep drilling, knowing we are broadly exploring in the right place, but this agreement will certainly expediate our program going forward."

Fire Assays vs. PhotonAssay

In 2020, half core samples from our drilling program were assayed using conventional fire assays.

Fire assays are done on a finely pulverised 50g subsample of the half core sample submitted for assay. This widely accepted protocol is the norm for gold assays worldwide but it has proven to potentially introduce a sampling bias, especially in samples containing larger (>75um) gold particles. This phenomenon is usually known as nugget effect.

In February 2021, Benz Mining reported assay results from the maiden drilling campaign at its high-grade Eastmain Gold project in northern Quebec, Canada. (11 February 2021: Assays confirm the discovery of 2 new trends at Eastmain).

Gold assays at the time had been exclusively conducted using Fire Assay with AA or gravimetric finish. The high-grade nature of the deposit with the presence of coarse visible gold prompted Benz Mining to investigate the appropriateness of Chrysos' PhotonAssay technology, a high energy X-Ray fluorescence technology, to analyse samples from Eastmain.

8,500kg of coarse crush rejects were shipped from Canada, where the technology is not yet available commercially, to Perth, Australia where PhotonAssay has been available for gold assays since 2018.

Coarse crush rejects are the leftover material from a standard sample preparation for fire assays. In the case of the 2020 drilling campaign, samples were half NQ core samples. Core length for individual samples ranged between 0.3m and 1.6m with weights ranging from 850g to 4.5kg. Fire Assays were conducted on 50g subsamples, leaving between 800g and 4.45kg of sample potentially containing singled out gold particles not captured in the sub-sampling process.

Exclusivity Deal with MSA Laboratories:

Benz is pleased to report the execution of a services agreement with MSA Laboratories Ltd (MSALABS) guaranteeing exclusivity for a maximum of 20,000 analysis per month by PhotonAssay in MSALABS' Val d'Or laboratory in Quebec, at ongoing commercial rates.

The laboratory is expected to be operational on 1^st December 2021 with a total nameplate analytical capacity of 40,000 samples per month, giving Benz up to 50% of the total laboratory capacity for an initial period of 12 months.

Benz is currently drilling over 1,200m of core per week. Sample intervals varies between 0.5m and 2m.

This analytical facility will also give Benz an opportunity to re-assay historical core, present on site at the Eastmain Gold project which was assayed by conventional Fire Assay in the past.

Table 1: Photon Assay results with Previously released Fire Assay Results (best assays >0.2g/t Au reported)

Section 2 Reporting of Exploration Results

(Criteria listed in the preceding section also apply to this section.)