Today’s top ASX silver news from Horizon, Mount Burgess and Equus

Freshly minted WA gold producer Horizon Minerals (ASX:HRZ) wants to dust off the high-grade Nimbus silver-zinc project to take advantage of higher prices.

Nimbus — adjacent to the company’s Boorara gold mine near Kalgoorlie — produced 3.6 million ounces of silver grading 352 grams per tonne (g/t) of ore between 2003 and 2007.

But with a current in-ground resource of 20.2 million ounces of silver and ~100,000 tonnes of zinc there’s plenty of opportunity here for divestment, joint venture, or standalone development.

Several ‘expressions of interest’ from third parties are currently under review, Horizon says.

“With silver and zinc prices showing sustained increases in recent times, the company is now assessing all options to create value from this historically successful mining operation at Nimbus,” managing director Jon Price says.

“We see significant opportunity to develop the high-grade lodes at Nimbus either on a stand-alone basis or in joint venture with an expert group.

“There [also] remains potential for the project to grow in scale and quality with further exploration beyond the current mineralised envelopes.”

Booming prices also inspired Mount Burgess Mining (ASX:MTB) to review two high-grade silver zones at the company’s polymetallic Kihabe deposit in Botswana.

Mount Burgess reckons there’s potential for further silver mineralisation to be identified within these zones.

The explorer wants to punch in additional drill holes around these high grade parts of the deposit, which currently includes 3 million ounces of silver as part of a bigger 14.4-million-tonne zinc-lead-silver resource.

Equus Mining (ASX:EQE) has picked up high-grade silver-gold rock chips at the ‘Pegaso’ targets, part of the advanced Cerro Bayo project in Chile.

Fifty-five samples were collected, with results confirming high-grades across all three targets — including a peak value of 4.6g/t gold and 2,810g/t silver.

A 25-hole (5,500m) diamond drilling program is currently in the works, Equus says.

“These high-grade results provide us with further confidence of the compelling brownfield potential at the Cerro Bayo project, particularly considering these targets sit along trend from several of the more significant, historical high grade silver and gold producing mines,” managing director John Braham says.