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Mining
Here are the biggest small cap resources winners in morning trade, Wednesday November 9.
(Up on no news)
The gold price is up and about, and so is hard-drilling 1.1Moz South Australian explorer BGD.
Its Tarcoola project is a brownfields site within trucking distance of BDG’s mothballed processing plant (yes, it already has a plant), while the Tunkillia project sits on a host structure extending 7km north and 7km south of the existing resource.
Over 15,000m of drilling was expected over the second half of the year to grow the Tarcoola and Tunkillia project footprints, making new regional discoveries, and building on the current ~1.1Moz resource.
BGD has targets all over the joint.
A resource update is planned for March 2023.
The $20m capped stock is very cashed up for its size with ~$10m in the bank.
(Up on no news)
BTR is about to kick off geotechnical and metallurgical drilling at the flagship 252,100oz Cork Tree Well (CTW) project in WA as part of initial feasibility studies.
There’s plenty of gold left to find though, managing director William Hobba says, both at Cork Tree Well and its wider tenure in the world-class Laverton goldfield.
“The drilling completed this year and in Q4 2021 has continued to show significant exploration upside potential as the drilling has not yet defined the limits of the mineralisation at CTW and Alpha, whilst also defining high-grade lodes that have potential for underground mining and parallel lodes at the main CTW resource,” he says.
Like BGD, BTR owns a mothballed processing plant which could save $$ if it pushes the button on a production decision.
AQI is acquiring the historic Falun mine, adjacent to its existing Greater Falun project in Sweden.
Falun was a monster in its day, producing 28Mt at 4% copper, 4g/t gold, 5% zinc, 2% lead and 35g/t silver over an estimated 1000 years.
It closed in 1992 amidst low commodity prices.
AQI says that despite its world class credentials, Falun has received little follow-up modern exploration since its closure. It’s geologists are now poring over old mine data.
AQI managing director Rob Sennitt says there is substantial upside at the mine.
“The strength of the opportunity is also demonstrated by Falun’s location along strike from our Greater Falun project, where we have just intersected visible zinc, copper and silver in the first hole at the new Skyttgruvan Naverberg target,” he says.
Skyttgruvan-Naverberg is only 3.5km along strike and hosted within the same lithological horizon as the Falun Mine, AQI says.
A second follow up diamond drill hole is now underway at that target, and core from the first hole has been dispatched to the laboratory for analysis. Assay results from the first drill hole are expected this quarter.
This result builds on AQI’s thesis that the Greater Falun project is part of a major mineralised belt that includes the historic Falun mine, Sennitt says.
“The opportunity to acquire the tenements associated with this historically significant mine allows us access to some of the most prospective tenure in the area while further consolidating our interests in the region.”
AQI now holds ~300sqkm in this mining district.
“Combined with our Sala Project, where we recently defined our maiden Resource, Alicanto now has two outstanding assets,” Sennitt says.
The resource at Sala, announced in July, contains 311,000t of zinc, 15Moz of silver and 44,000t of lead.
A bunch of geophysical anomalies, including one measuring a colossal 42km by 9km, indicates there is lithium in brines at AM7’s Bitterwasser project in Namibia.
Some of these new targets are below existing clay hosted resources at Eden Pan (85.2Mt at 633ppm for 286909t LCE).
“This is a significant exploration milestone for Arcadia,” AM7 exec chair Jurie Wessels says.
“The discovery of large and compelling geophysical features conforming to the characteristics of brine trap sites, some of which are situated below known mineralised pans, is the penultimate step forward towards a potential company transforming discovery of brine deposits.
“Our next step after receiving final interpretation of the geophysical data is to identify drill targets and to commence with drilling operations to explore for deep-seated lithium deposits.”
AML has pulled up a thick 98m long intercept grading 2.56% recoverable copper equivalent (CuEq) from 319m at Amy West, part of the advanced Walford Creek copper-cobalt project in QLD.
This hit extends Amy West another 90m from a hole drilled in 2018, which returned 46m at 2.93% CuEq.
There are a bunch of assays outstanding, but the AML already thinks the mineralisation runs for another 500m.
Importantly, this hit at Amy West is also higher grade than existing resources at Walford Creek, AML says.
“… the top 48 metres of the … intersection returned 1.78% copper and 0.33% cobalt, which is the highest-grade copper/cobalt intercept ever recorded at Walford Creek,” the company says.
“The second intercept of 43 metres is copper-only rich and returned 1.57% copper, a record intercept for copper-only rich mineralisation.
“By way of comparison, the Vardy and Marley (higher grade) copper Mineral Resource Estimates average 1.08% Cu and 0.15% Co. The in-situ grades from [new hole] WFDH548 demonstrate a substantially higher tenor.”
With today’s results, it is now likely that the eastern resources at Walford Creek (Vardy and Marley zones) will be joined by a higher-grade westerly concentration of mineralisation at Amy West, “thereby offering up new possibilities for mine development and potentially project scale”.
The current resource at Walford Creek includes 20.1Mt at 1.08% Cu, 0.15% Co and 31g/t Ag at Marley/Vardy, and 5.1Mt @ 1.25% Cu, 0.15% Co and 36.9g/t Ag at Amy.
Earlier this year the company paused a project pre-feasibility study to drill out more resources and allow escalating global input costs to level out.
At the time, it said there was a further 6km of strike along the Fish River Fault to the west (Amy and Le Mans zones) “which is largely limited by the paucity of drilling”.
“The recent 2021 geophysical surveys [also] highlighted a further 16km of potential strike length to test across multiple targets exhibiting similar geophysical signatures to known mineralisation,” it said.
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