Silver Mines restarts drilling at Barabolar as it eyes Bowdens approval

With approvals for its Bowdens Silver Project in the final stretch, Silver Mines has restarted drilling at the Barabolar Project just 10km from Bowdens, the largest undeveloped silver project in Australia and one of the largest in the world.

Barabolar is a top quality exploration project within the highly prospective Macquarie Arc, which also hosts world-class mineral systems such as the Cadia-Ridgeway porphyry copper-gold deposit.

The project area comprises 1,950 km² of titles covering approximately 80km of strike of highly mineralised multiple target styles and mineral occurrences. These are similar to Bowdens copper-gold targets, and its high-grade silver-lead-zinc epithermal and volcanogenic massive sulphide (VMS) systems.

Silver Mines’ (ASX:SVL) drilling is the first exploration in the western section of the area for more than 27 years. With modern surveying and machine learning algorithms, the company has generated numerous new high priority drill targets from multiple exploration datasets within the project.

Managing Director Anthony McClure commented: “At the outset of Covid-19, we deferred work at Barabolar and focussed on areas with our own freehold land in and around the Bowdens Silver Project.

“It is great news for the Company to recommence drilling activities at the exciting Barabolar Project given its considerable anomalism on surface with significant mineralised porphyry potential. We currently have three diamond rigs continuing at Bowdens Silver and one at Barabolar.”

The initial program is expected to comprise at least 2,000 metres of diamond drilling.

The restart of drilling at Barabolar comes as outstanding results continue to come from the Bowdens project, including visible gold from beneath the existing ore reserve and extremely high grade silver hits.

Silver Mines is in the final stages of development approval for a 2-million-tonne-per-annum open pit operation that would have an initial mine life of 16.5 years producing about 66 million ounces of silver, 130,000 tonnes of zinc and 95,000 tonnes of lead.

Results from ongoing drilling beneath the open pit reserve will form the basis for a Mineral Resource Estimate as part of a Scoping Study of underground mining scenarios, which is expected to be completed during the second quarter of 2022.

The progress at Bowdens comes as analysts forecast massive growth in silver demand in the coming decades thanks to the white metal’s use in clean energy technology such as solar panels and electric vehicles.

This article was developed in collaboration with Silver Mines, 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.