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Chalice sinks the drill rig into Thor, looking for nickel, copper and PGEs at Venture’s Julimar lookalike
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Drilling has finally begun on the 20km Julimar lookalike Thor trend at Venture Minerals’ South West project, with none other than Julimar’s founder Chalice Mining behind the rig.
Chalice (ASX:CHN) is farming into Venture’s (ASX:VMS) South West project, where drilling will go towards the $1.2 million spend it needs to complete its earn in 51% of the JV.
By spending another $2.5m, the well backed ASX 200 explorer can claim a 70% stake in the ground, where it has also started an auger surface geochemistry program to define other base and precious metals anomalies along the exciting Thor magnetic trend.
Following on from Chalice’s discovery of the world class Gonneville discovery at Julimar, 70km north of Perth, the South West project is located 240km south in the Balingup Metamorphic Belt.
Despite that distance it sits in the same sort of turf within the highly prospective West Yilgarn nickel-copper-PGE province.
And with multiple EM targets, the 20km Thor bears striking similarities to the Julimar trend where Chalice struck surprise paydirt two years ago.
Drilling to its core
Even before Chalice came on board, Venture’s previous work identified 13 highly conductive anomalies at Thor within the southern 6.5km of the regional magnetic feature.
Just two have been tested by single holes in a program in 2018, before Chalice’s Julimar discovery unlocked the prospectivity of the West Yilgarn.
With the last drill hole hitting 2.4m of massive sulphides at 0.5% copper, 0.05% nickel and 0.04% cobalt with anomalous gold and palladium.
The separate Odin trend has been drilled just once with nickel and copper sulphides intersected within a mafic-ultramafic unit extending over 10 strike kilometres, supported by surface sampling with hints of nickel and copper.
But having a company with the heft and track record of Chalice on board augurs well for the new drill drive.
“The Company is looking forward to seeing the drill core from its JV partner Chalice Mining’s Maiden Drilling Program at Thor as it targets high priority EM anomalies that potentially represent massive sulfide bodies,” Venture MD Andrew Radonjic said.
“Venture is also encouraged by Chalice’s commitment to the South West Project with not only drilling the current priority bedrock conductors, but also to generating other potential drill targets for later testing through an extensive Auger Geochem Program along the prospective 20 km long Thor magnetic trend.”
This article was developed in collaboration with Venture 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.
