Kincora Copper starts drilling to confirm ‘Cowal-style’ discovery at Fairholme

Kincora Copper has started drilling to confirm and expand previous significant intervals at the advanced Fairholme project in the very fertile Lachlan Fold Belt of NSW in its pursuit of “Cowal-style” gold and base metal mineralisation.

Kincora Copper (ASX:KCC) has kicked off drilling just down the road from Evolution Mining’s (ASX:EVN) flagship Cowal project which is located in a gold corridor that so far has an endowment of 13.7 million oz of gold.

“We are at a very exciting phase of our drilling program testing two advanced projects that have hallmarks of their neighbouring world-class deposits that host a total of over 20 million oz of gold and over 5 million tonnes of copper, with one rig at our Trundle project, in a brownfield setting to the Northparkes mine, and another just commenced at Fairholme,” CEO Sam Spring says.

“Our first phase drilling at Fairholme is located just 15km on trend from the Cowal mine ‘gold corridor’ with analogous mineral tenure, alteration, geochemical zonation, structure and scale.

“The significant resource growth at Cowal makes previous intervals at Fairholme, like 123m at 0.62 grams per tonne (g/t) gold and 0.12% copper from open pit depths, with multiple higher-grade intervals including 5m at 8.21g/t gold and 0.85% copper, even more significant and that haven’t been followed up.”

Previous explorers largely underestimated the potential scale of the gold corridor in the Cowal region, with no drilling taking place at the now Kincora-owned Fairholme project since 2016.

But since Evolution acquired its Cowal project in mid-2015, it has grown the gold inventory from 3.4 million oz to 9.7 million oz (net of mining 1.7 million oz) and has set a target of 15 million oz.

And Evolution recently approved the $380m development of an underground mine on the GRE46 deposit, which lies within the gold corridor at Cowal, to increase the grade at the existing operation.

This move supports the planned expansion of the mine to 350,000 oz each year and extends the life of Cowal out beyond 17 years.

But before Kincora picked up the Fairholme project, exploration had been focused on the copper porphyry potential despite the explorer at the time, Kaizen Discovery, recognising the potential for Cowal-style gold deposits.

Prior to Kaizen’s exploration, between 1990 and 2005, the project was explored extensively by gold major Newcrest Mining (ASX:NCM), with a total of 62,768m of drilling across 641 holes.

In 1997, Newcrest made the nearby Marsden porphyry discovery that is now owned by Evolution and hosts 1 million oz of gold and 500,000 tonnes of copper. Kincora’s technical director, John Holliday, was involved in the discovery and resource definition stages at Marsden.

This has led to a prime opportunity for Kincora, which is now undertaking maiden drilling to test the potential for Cowal-style gold and base metal mineralisation at the Fairholme project, as well as follow up previous significant broad and high-grade intervals at the Gateway prospect.

The initial five-hole, 1700m program will look to replicate the exploration targets, techniques and success achieved by Evolution at Cowal.

Kincora has been approved for a program of up to 6000m of drilling across 39 holes, including follow up diamond and aircore programs at the Gateway prospect, and aircore drilling of other underexplored known mineralised prospects.

The company looks to be on the path to replicating the success of other miners in the region.

Earlier in July, Kincora received even more proof its brownfields Trundle project has all the right ingredients to be another Northparkes – Australia’s second-largest porphyry mine.

Drilling continues at Trundle at the Mordialloc North-East prospect.

This article was developed in collaboration with Kincora Copper, 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.