Alma Metals (ASX:ALM) is adding to its bank balance to enable it to follow up a top intersection in an expanded drill program at its Briggs Copper Project in Queensland.
The junior explorer has raised an additional $750,000 after receiving commitments for the purchase of 100 million shares at $0.0075 each via a company-led placement to new and existing sophisticated investors.
Executive Chairman Alasdair Cooke, non-executive Director Valentine Chitalu and Managing Director Frazer Tabeart are also participating in the capital raise, contributing $140,000 subject to shareholder approval.
Tabeart says the latest drill results have confirmed the potential for increasing both the size and the grade of the resource at Briggs, which now clearly has the potential to become a major copper deposit.
“New funding will be used to extend the current drill program to improve resource confidence and potentially allow commencement of a Scoping Study later this year,” he says.
This follows news of Alma’s best results so far, with drilling intersecting 276m @ 0.45% copper from surface.
In late August when the news was released, Tabeart said the results showed “significantly higher” copper grades were present within the Briggs resource.
The Briggs Copper Project currently hosts an inferred resource of 415 million tonnes @ 0.25% copper and 31 parts per million molybdenum, for contained resources of 1 million tonnes of copper and over 28.6 million pounds of molybdenum.
Alma, which has a market capitalisation of just over $13 million, has also outlined an exploration target for growing the resource, which envisages the potential to add a further 450 million to 900 million tonnes at similar grades.
The deposit outcrops at surface, with an area measuring 2km long and up to 1km wide mapped out via geology and soil geochemistry, but with less than half that area drilled to date.
Drilling undertaken since the release of the July 2023 resource estimate has so far confirmed that the highest grades of copper mineralisation in the top 200m are located below the highest grades of copper-in-soil anomalism.
The currently funded drilling is investigating untested areas for higher grade copper and molybdenum mineralisation below the best soil anomalies within and slightly extending the resource outline.
Five holes have been completed to date with a sixth underway.
Alma now plans to drill a further two to three holes to a depth of 250 to 300m targeting higher grades on the southern side of the Briggs Central resource.
Drilling from both the 2024 and 2023 programs will provide data to support an upgrade of the resource into the higher confidence indicated category for part of the deposit and provide material for metallurgical test work.
Alma says contractor iDrilling Australia has agreed to accept shares at $0.0075 each to cover $75,000 of its fees. This follows an initial agreement in late May 2024 under which iDrilling accepted Alma shares priced at $0.012 each to cover $240,000 worth of fees.
Write to Angela East at Mining.com.au
Images: Alma Metals
