Loyal Metals looks to unwrap legacy copper asset using AI and modern technology

• Loyal Metals on the hunt for more copper at historic Highway Reward project
• MD says legacy asset has great potential
• Company using AI and legacy data to look for new discoveries

Last month, Loyal Metals (ASX:LLM) picked up the historic Highway-Reward copper mine in Queensland in a move that could unlock the project, which has lain dormant for more than 20 years.

Managing Director Adam Richie is confident both in the future of copper as a commodity for electrification and in the project’s potential to host untapped red metal.

“This wasn’t so much of a pivot away from lithium as a broadening,” he said.

“We believe in an electric future and the demand for a whole bunch of copper and lithium.”

“Copper is in high demand in the vending space, everyone wants a good copper project.”

And Highway Reward could be exactly that. Amongst the world’s highest-grade copper mines, the project operated from 1987 to 2005 with historical production of 3.65Mt at 5.7% copper and 260kt at 4.5 g/t gold.

Throughout the mine’s 20-year dormancy, Terra Search’s Dr Simon Beams has preserved a comprehensive and robust archive of exploration and mining data — an invaluable foundation for revitalisation.

Dr Beams himself has more than 38 years of hands-on experience at the mine, in fact he was sitting on the drill rig that found the discovery back in the day as a fresh 26 year old.

And now, Dr Beams and Loyal Metals have teamed up to explore the remnant potential and upside exploration at the project.

The company is taking the doctor’s expertise and combining it with the legacy data from the project to digitise and leveraging modern AI tools to fast-track new discoveries.

“We’re using MobileMTd technology and unwrapping all that old data and putting it into VRIFY’s cutting-edge DORA platform, which uses AI to target stuff that we just couldn’t possibly find just sifting through the details ourselves,” Ritchie said.

“It’s something like two terabytes of data we’re going to get just from the MobileMTd, and the computers crunch it all up for us.”

“The beauty of it is, the project has had one of the biggest VMS systems in the world there already mined so we already know what the right signatures are and we know what we’re looking for.”

“That’s the power of AI, if it’s going to work anywhere its going to work here.”

Looking to make new discovery

The MobileMTd technology is capable of investigating depths beyond 1,000 metres – for context, the historical mine was only mined to depths of around 220m for the open pit and 390m underground.

Ritchie said leveraging this modern tech would enhance drill target generation, reduce exploration timelines and improve decision-making accuracy.

And investors are already chomping at the bit to get involved.

“All the investors that are coming in now are the ones that have seen legacy assets revitalised in the past” Ritchie said.

The company also has a board with a history of taking juniors through to the big leagues.

“In January we brought on Blair Way who essentially took Patriot Battery Metals from $50m to $2bn over the last lithium cycle,” Ritchie said.

“He’s a Queensland boy and a Canadian, so it works perfectly on the board.”

“And our top 20 is close to 60% now, so it’s very tightly held stock, with great supporters, and $5.8m in funding”

At Stockhead, we tell it like it is. While Loyal Metals is a Stockhead advertiser, it did not sponsor this article.