Antipa’s major plans are backed by some of the biggest names in the business

Antipa has a strong pipeline of results and upcoming activity to come from fully partner funded exploration programs across three very large-scale farm-in and joint venture projects with some of the biggest names in Australia’s mining sector.

These include drilling, soil sampling, and both airborne and ground geophysical surveying at its Paterson Farm-in Project with IGO, which needs to pump in $30m to earn a 70% interest, and giant miner Rio Tinto carrying out drilling and geophysical surveying at their Citadel Joint Venture Project (35% Antipa owned).

Antipa Minerals (ASX:AZY) is also working with Newcrest, which is carrying out target identification and ranking ahead of planned aircore drilling and soil sampling next year at their Wilki Farm-in Project, with Newcrest needing to spend $60m to earn a 75% interest.

Managing director Roger Mason said the company “was in a highly enviable position with significant ongoing exploration across its belt-scale Paterson Province exploration and project development portfolio”.

Heavily backed favourite

Significantly, the vast majority of its 5,100km² plus Paterson portfolio (about 4,950km²) is fully funded by Rio Tinto, Newcrest and IGO, which provides shareholders with the benefit of large-scale advanced exploration.

“Over the last seven years the Paterson Province’s 32 million ounce gold and three million tonne copper Telfer plus Nifty pre – mining endowment has grown by a staggering 16 million ounces of gold and three million tonnes of copper,” Mason added.

“The discoveries made from under cover included Winu, Havieron, Calibre and Minyari, with Antipa generating over four million ounces of this gold endowment growth”.

“We believe this is just the beginning of the Paterson’s discovery renaissance with significant tier one gold copper discovery potential remaining and Antipa positioned to benefit from up to $115 million dollars in combined partner exploration funding.”

Mason is particularly keen on the Paterson Project and its exciting new soil, air core and exciting new co-incident gravity magnetic targets within the highly prospective El Paso Structural Corridor, which extends from Havieron in the southeast, past Winu in the northwest.

It is worth noting that the 5.5Moz gold and 222kt copper Havieron resource and the 1.8Moz gold 64kt copper Minyari resource are both co- incident magnetic-gravity high anomalies, which drives home the significance of these new targets.

“Our tenure has just enough shallow cover to conceal but allows us to detect (via geophysics and soil sampling), potential tier one gold copper deposits,” he explained.

“The project scale, systematic exploration approach by our Paterson Farm-in Project partner IGO is designed to target any potential giants lurking under this shallow cover”.

“Exploration results through the last year provide great encouragement, defining a number of early stage but high priority exploration targets that have the potential to deliver a major greenfield discovery.”

Joint venture and farm-in projects

During 2021 and 2022, exploration by IGO at the Paterson Project delivered multiple high-priority copper-gold targets including three aircore anomalies – one with a co-incident magnetic anomaly, four soil anomalies, and two coincident gravity and magnetic high anomalies.

Ongoing and planned activities include aircore drilling, geophysical surveys, project-scale groundwater hydrogeochemical sampling, as well as data integration and 3D model development.

IGO also plans to carry out diamond drilling over two Havieron look-alike targets about 15km along strike from Rio Tinto’s Winu project in the second quarter of 2023.

At Citadel, Rio Tinto has completed ground geophysical surveys with modelling ongoing and is planning to carry out 3,500 to 4,000m of reverse circulation drilling on multiple targets around the Rimfire area and select regional targets.

Preliminary assessment of key potential Calibre deposit development parameters including potential Calibre Mineral Resource update and metallurgical test work will also be carried out.

Over at Wilki, Newcrest has been carrying out data integration, target identification and ranking, which is expected to lead to aircore drilling of priority targets and soil sampling during the first half of 2023.

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This article was developed in collaboration with Antipa Minerals (ASX:AZY), 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.