Alicanto charges into resource drilling after Sala returns bonanza silver-zinc grades

Well funded Alicanto has wasted no time launching an extensive drilling program to establish a maiden resource for its Sala project after its first hole hit bonanza grades of silver and zinc.

Confidence is growing, along with the number of drills at Alicanto, that the company has a significant opportunity to quickly produce its maiden resource at Sala within the next six months.

An initial target area for the resource has been defined with 500m (strike), 500m (down-dip) and a mineralised zone containing multiple wide stacked lodes over 250m.

“Grade is King” of course (and Sala has this in spades), with multiple stacked lodes also boding well for optimisation of a potentially high production rate in the near future based on wide and high-grade intercepts of:

• 7.1m @ 81 g/t Ag, 10.4% Zn & 0.6% Pb
• 5.5m @ 69 g/t Ag, 7.4% Zn & 0.8% Pb
• 11.9m @ 15 g/t Ag, 8.1% Zn & 0.1% Pb
• 9.85m @ 203 g/t Ag, 6.4% Zn 0.8% Pb
• 0.8m @ 1,034 g/t Ag, 1.5% Zn, 2.4% Pb
• 0.7m @ 844 g/t Ag, 1.8% Zn, 16.3% Pb

Small wonder then that Alicanto Minerals (ASX:AQI) has kicked off a three-stage exploration program, with the first stage consisting of 10,000m of drilling aimed at establishing a maiden resource within the area of historical drilling and its own step-out drilling.

This is in addition to the 4,000m of drilling that the company has already completed.

Two diamond drill rigs are currently on site at the Sala silver-lead-zinc project in Sweden with a third currently being mobilised.

“In light of the strong results and visuals reported from our initial drilling and our desire to establish a resource as quickly as possible, we have increased our drilling capacity from one rig to three,” managing director Peter George said.

“The grades within our initial focus area are exceptional and we believe that this is just the start.”

While the Sala mine produced over 200 million ounces of silver at an average grade of 1,244g/t, George added that it was only mined down to 290m.

Very little modern exploration has been completed over the area since mining ceased in 1908.

“We have already identified multiple lodes up to 35m in width of high-grade mineralisation more than 800m along strike from the old mine at 500m down dip of surface mineralisation with strong indications of a lot more in the vicinity,” he added.

Further activity

Following completion of resource drilling, the company’s planned Stage 2 work will step out from the central resource area and grow the scale of the Sala system.

It noted that the success of the 140m step-out hole down-dip from the deepest known mineralisation at Sala, combined with work in the recently completed desktop study of historical mining and drilling, indicates that the mineralised corridor with multiple stacked high-grade lodes continues along strike to the north and south and at depth.

This is noted by historical drilling with an intercept 600m to the south returning 3m at 8.2% zinc and 3g/t silver just 25m from surface, a very high-grade 0.7m interval at 844g/t silver, 16.3% lead and 1.8% zinc about 200m along strike to the northwest, and a 6.1m intersection grading 185g/t silver and 1% lead about 200m below the deepest mined zone at Sala.

Alicanto will then move on to regional exploration, noting that its historical review has indicated that almost no modern systematic exploration has been conducted over the greater project area.

It added that while data from the shallow diamond drilling carried out by Avesta Jernverks AB prior to World War 2 has been lost, the fact that the company had applied for mining tenements indicates that it had intersected mineralisation.

Targets are currently being evaluated.

This article was developed in collaboration with Alicanto Minerals, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing.

This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.