- Alvo Minerals is set to kickstart its broad, maiden diamond drilling campaign at the Palma project in Brazil
- That’s the culmination of 18 months of hard work and expectations are high
- The company is well funded to carry out its Brazilian mission, having received recent $4.1m backing
Special Report: Alvo Minerals (ASX:ALV) continues its Brazilian high-grade copper and zinc hunt apace, with a maiden diamond drilling campaign set to get underway this month at the Palma VMS Cu-Zn project.
Copper and zinc explorer Alvo Minerals has the drills ready to spin as it prepares for what it deems to be its most exciting drill program to date.
It’s targeting multiple new high-priority, completely untested copper-zinc prospects at its Palma Volcanogenic Massive Sulphide (VMS) Cu-Zn project.
Alvo is aiming to replicate some of the drilling success at its C3 and C1 deposits that will be incorporated in the updated Mineral Resource Estimate of its existing resource of 4.6Mt @ 1.0% Cu, 3.9% Zn, 0.4% Pb & 20g/t Ag scheduled for Q2 CY2024, with highlights including:
- 23m @ 5.5% CuEq or 13.4% ZnEq inc. 11m @ 10.1% CuEq or 24.7% ZnEq (C3)
- 16m @ 6.4% CuEq or 15.6% ZnEq inc. 7m @ 9.8% CuEq or 23.8% ZnEq (C3)
- 22m @ 4.8% CuEq or 11.7% CuEq inc. 8m @ 7.7% CuEq or 18.8% ZnEq (C1)
More on that below, but for further background, the broad operation gets underway on the back of two recent big recent bits of news for the company in April.
A couple of weeks ago, Alvo announced it secured some significant funding to the tune of $4.1 million from the Brazilian private equity group Ore Investments.
The Palma VMS project is adjacent to Alvo Minerals’ ionic adsorption clay-hosted (IAC) rare earths Bluebush project, on the other side of the town of Palmeiropolis in Brazil, and the funding is being funnelled into both these high-priority projects.
Now for the big show
Alvo’s big diamond drilling campaign has several regional untested targets at Palma in its sights.
This pipeline of new prospects has been systematically refined and prioritised over the past 18 months through mapping, geophysics, soil sampling and auger drilling.
Initial diamond drilling program of up to 5,000m is slated to begin in early May and the expectation for new discoveries is high, given the polymetallic nature of VMS mineralisation which can also typically cluster deposits.
The company’s detailed exploration to date has refined three initial high priority prospects, which include: Urubu, a potential faulted northern extension of Palma’s C3 deposit; Anta: a 3km soil anomaly; and C4-NE, a new prospect adjacent to Alvo’s C4 Brownfields discovery made in late 2023.
‘A unique position as a junior explorer’
Alvo’s MD Rob Smakman expressed his company’s growing anticipation about what lies beneath the surface at Palma, describing the maiden drilling as “our most exciting to date, having been the culmination of countless hours of detailed data collection and interpretation to refine and priorities the large number of targets across the >70km of prospective strike.”
“Our team has worked in the background over the past 18 months, bringing these new prospects to a point where drilling is the next logical step to confirm a discovery.
“Our broader exploration model at Palma has always been to make discoveries of high-grade copper and zinc deposits on our district scale land package in a proven VMS belt. We believe this puts Alvo in a unique position as a junior explorer.”
Exploration to continue
While the drilling gets underway this month, exploration across the Palma project will continue, notes the company, with additional work expected to advance prospects TG-01, C5, C5N and Anta SE to drill ready status.
Along with the aforementioned priority targets – in particular Anta – Alvo believes that any one of its Palma prospects could be a “company-making” discovery.
This article was developed in collaboration with Alvo 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.