Fresh drilling has more than doubled the size of the regionally-defining Boda discovery in NSW’s red-hot Lachlan Fold Belt.
In September last year, gold producer Alkane (ASX:ALK) discovered something very, very big at its Northern Molong porphyry project (NMPP), in the same neighbourhood as Newcrest Mining’s (ASX:NCM) mammoth 50moz Cadia operations in NSW.
Alkane unveiled this incredible hit at the Boda prospect — 502m at 0.48 grams per tonne (g/t) gold and 0.2 per cent copper, 211m from surface.
That might seem low grade, but because of their easy-mining large volumes, porphyry orebodies can be economic from copper concentrations as low as 0.15 per cent.
Alkane says there’s “several apparent similarities” between Boda and the upper sections of Newcrest’s nearby Cadia East deposit. Basically, they’re saying this could be Cadia 2.0.
For Alkane — and a few of its small cap neighbours — this was a share price re-rating event, and now there’s numerous explorers searching for the next big porphyry discovery in the so-called Lachlan Fold of NSW.
‘A large, tier 1 copper project’
New drilling by Alkane shows a large porphyry system 400m wide, 1km long and more then 1.1km deep.
The southern-most drillhole, designed to test the ‘Boda Two’ anomaly, hit gold indicative of a whole new porphyry system.
Investors weren’t impressed (potentially by the grades), with the stock down ~8 per cent in morning trade.
Either way, Alkane believes Boda is shaping up to be a large, tier one gold-copper porphyry project, managing director Nic Earner says.
“We’ve mobilised a second diamond drill rig to site and we are currently targeting the identified high grade areas, infilling the very long and deep mineralised system and testing identified anomalies at Kaiser and, further to the south of Boda, an area about 5km in length.
“We anticipate being able to report the next round of results from this campaign in late December this year.”