Titan moves quickly to restart drilling at 2Moz Ecuadorian project

Special Report: Titan is cashed up and positioning itself to restart drilling at its hot new 2.1-million-ounce flagship Dynasty project in Ecuador.

Titan Minerals (ASX:TTM) has nearly $15m cash in the bank following a recent capital raising and has now awarded the drilling contract so it can get cracking on exploration at its flagship Dynasty project and the nearby Copper Duke gold-copper porphyry project.

Investors welcomed the news, pushing shares up around 11 per cent to 15c on Thursday morning.

Titan Minerals (ASX:TTM) share price chart:

The Dynasty project has a 2.1-million-ounce non-JORC resource that Titan is working quickly to elevate to JORC-compliant status (a must-have for ASX-listed junior explorers).

“Our team is happy to be back in the field in Ecuador, working through logistics for mobilising drill teams, and continuing field work,” managing director Laurie Marsland said.

“With COVID-19 management policies now in place, the commencement of drilling will be a key catalyst in the near term for better defining mineralisation at our flagship Dynasty gold project.”

Multi-pronged approach

While Titan is prepping to restart drilling, it has also awarded a contract for an airborne geophysical survey it expects to begin early in Q3.

The survey will be flown over both Dynasty and Copper Duke.

Prior drilling has already indicated mineralisation could span for some distance across the 139sqkm project.

The tested Comanche and Brecha veins are located just 800m from shallow pits that produced 44 per cent more gold than originally modelled.

Small-scale mining at these pits over a three-year period has demonstrated a substantially higher vein density at the project, with metal added in known veins, and with the discovery of additional veins.

Ecuador exploration on fire

Former geologist and experienced stockbroker Guy Le Page told Stockhead previously that Ecuador has been a hot exploration destination for the past couple of years.

You only have to look at the success of SolGold’s (LSE-SOLG and TSX-SOLG) world class Cascabel porphyry copper-gold discovery up north.

In 2016/2017, Cascabel caught the attention of ASX-listed majors Newcrest Mining (ASX:NCM) and BHP (ASX:BHP) which took large equity positions in the early stage explorer.

By 2020, SolGold’s development-ready Alpala project was by any definition a Tier 1 world-class deposit – 10.9 million tonnes of copper, 24 million ounces of gold and 100 million ounces of silver.

For Titan, Dynasty is an advanced exploration project with a multi-million-ounce foreign resource at a high grade of 4.5 grams per tonne (g/t) gold that the company is aiming to convert to a JORC resource before the end of this year.

Meanwhile, Copper Duke is an early stage project, located east of Dynasty, comprising 13 concessions spanning 130sqkm.

Titan says Copper Duke has shown evidence of multiple gold and gold-copper anomalies at surface, often associated with magnetite alteration, which is expected to return a strong response in the magnetic survey.