Ahead of the Pack: As prices soar, Investigator is the only pure-play silver development in Australia

• IVR is targeting first silver at its Paris project next year
• Upcoming DFS expected to return excellent economics
• Company the only ASX player offering 100% leverage to silver price

Over the last 12 months, Investigator Resources (ASX:IVR) has been cleaning up its assets to focus on the 57Moz Paris silver project in South Australia and for good reason.

The company is hard at work on a definitive feasibility study on a 1.5Mtpa operation on what is widely regarded as the highest grade undeveloped pure-play silver deposit in Australia.

And now, with silver prices soaring to around US$48/oz, MD Lachlan Wallace says his company offers investors the most genuine leverage to silver thanks to its unique geology.

“There’s silver equivalent projects, which are really lead and zinc mines, and then there’s us – we’re the only company that provides 100% leverage to the silver price,” he said.

“The Paris silver mine has 57Moz, it’s the only silver asset that’s development scale in Australia.

“The fundamental difference between us and lead and zinc mines – which are effectively what people are promoting as silver equivalent mines – is that those metal prices are effectively flat.

“People are jumping on the bandwagon for silver but we are the only genuine silver (only) asset in Australia.”

The project hosts the Apollo prospect, which returned 8m at over 1200g/t and has a plethora of silver targets to test, with a 15km long silver corridor surrounding the project home to several prospects that could make a hub-and-spoke model profitable.

The company recently earned into neighbour Alliance Resources’ Athena project, which was drilled for iron ore back in 2012. After the success of Paris that was re-assayed for silver, returning between 493-950g/t – but there’s been no follow up drilling since.

Investigator plans to commence drilling there early next year.

Wallace thinks the company could have a district-scale super system on its hands, with the next steps now to drill early next year to see which prospects could be developed as satellite pits which would feed into the plant the company intends to build around the Paris silver project.

Silver price a boost for project economics

The DFS is due in the first half of next year and is expected to highlight a robust economic outlook for the project.

“The PFS was done in 2021, it returned free cash of about $487m but the price at that time was about A$34/oz. We’re now currently over A$70/oz so when you actually run that new price deck through the PFS model what you have is another $930m of free cash on top of that $480m – so it obviously makes a material difference to the project,” Wallace said.

“Since then costs will have gone up as well so what we’re doing is working through an updated feasibility study that takes into account not only the increased price but how we can reduce operating and capital costs from the flowsheet and changing from dry tails to a wet tails dam.”

The company has also been rightsizing the plant, assessing throughput at 1.5Mtpa because it was the most balanced configuration, combining strong project economics, capital efficiency and funding resilience.

“We really ran it through the lens of a financier, so basically downgrading the price, downgrading the grade, increasing the costs etc putting all of those stress conditions that a financier would look through,” Wallace said.

Investigator is well stocked for the tasks of drilling and feasibility work. It has $10m in the kitty secured in the form of a 4.2c a share placement completed earlier this month, including fresh capital from its largest shareholder Jupiter Asset Management.

At 5.8c, IVR’s shares have already run well beyond that placement price and are almost 200% higher YTD.

Path to first silver looking good

But what the company is really focused on is getting to first silver as quickly as possible.

“We have also launched the permitting process to make sure government as a customer gets the information they need to be able to push through the permitting as reasonably quickly as practical,” Wallace said.

Overall, the process is looking positive and the company is zeroing in on production.

“In addition to the Paris silver corridor, about 80km away we have a number of tenements that we have drilled historically and earned some nice silver hits including 12m at 240g/t,” Wallace said.

“We are undertaking some soil geochemical surveys over the next few weeks as well as a geophysical gravity survey really just to rank those and look at the next exploration opportunity as a hub and spoke opportunity for the Paris plant.”

A permitting process is also underway at Paris, with engagement held with the SA Government to scope its Mining Lease Application.

At Stockhead, we tell it like it is. While Investigator Resources is a Stockhead advertiser, it did not sponsor this article.