Austral Resources (ASX:AR1) reports its planned development and exploration program for the remainder of 2022 and the first half of 2023 will continue development at its prospects across the Western Tenement Area.
The company says the aim of the exploration activities include extending the mine life beyond the current 4 years at Anthill by discovering additional oxide ore, increasing the current mineral resource estimate (MRE), monetising the company’s current sulphide mineral resource; and exploring for primary copper and base metal sulphide mineralisation within its 2,100km-square exploration tenure.
Its current MRE of 60M tonnes @ 0.7% Cu hosts 420,000 tonnes of contained copper, and within this mineralisation by type is around 50% sulphide, 25% transitional and 25% oxide, and the company is reviewing this resource inventory with the aim of expanding and commercialising it.
Austral Resources Managing Director and CEO Dan Juancey said the company is thrilled that it is now on track with its Anthill copper production with the Mt Kelly processing facility hitting 1,000 tonnes per month during this quarter.
“This enables our team to focus on the longer term future of Austral, and extending our revenue potential through exploration. Our team continues to set about defining additional copper oxide and sulphide resources that both extend and increase feed to the Mt Kelly plant and extend Austral’s mine life.
This discovery process has seen a range of exploration activities progress over 2022″
This discovery process has seen a range of exploration activities progress over 2022. This work will hopefully deliver some further outstanding exploration results over coming months that build on the strong assay metrics recently announced from our Lady Colleen deposit.
Looking to 2023, the next stages of our ongoing exploration program are already taking shape. A key area of focus in next year’s copper oxide exploration program will be identified targets within 50km of our Mt Kelly SE-EW plant at Mt Kelly.
We are proud of our development journey, for such a small team to have achieved so many milestones is very pleasing. As the company’s Mt Kelly copper cathode production facility continues to build scale, it will provide a revenue base that helps us fund our ongoing exploration efforts.
While this ramp up phase is occurring, we continue to explore ways to realise the prospectivity inherent across our tenure.”
Austral says 2022 copper oxide exploration has systematically progressed at Lady Annie where phase one exploration drilling is targeting geophysical targets, at Lady Treska geophysical VTEM anomaly occurs within a coincidental gravity anomaly offset 100m to the west, at Big Nose the ‘largest’ geophysical gravity anomaly on mining lease displays a coincidental spatial distribution of high amplitude gravity with anomalous copper in soils over 500ppm.
It also reports during 2022 the area surrounding the Anthill mine was reviewed using historical and newly acquired additional data, and ‘significant’ amount of historical exploration work has been completed including surface sampling, drilling and mapping which was integrated with additional information.
This additional information included following up on targets identified by previous explorers, process freely available land satellite data to delineate geological lithology types, exposed mineralogy and signify geological domain boundaries, as well as assessing previous drillhole and exploration data in relation to newfound targets and geological knowledge gleaned from exposures in the current mining operation has been integrated into the exploration design.
Austral reports it intends to drill 24 holes for 3,630m, with the highest priority 19 holes total 2,200m and further drilling of lower priority holes will be dependent on phase one results.
At McLeod Hill the inferred resource of 1.42M tonnes @ 0.49% Cu is correlated with an outcropping zone of developed hematite alteration running parallel to and adjacent to the McNamara Fault, and details of the 2022 exploration program includes surface sampling at around 500 rock chips over the southern area of the McLeod Hill mining lease has been completed, and the company has planned the drilling of 10 holes for 800m.
The key area of focus for Austral’s 2023 copper oxide exploration program is located within the company’s Western Tenement Area (WTA), and a key positive for the viability of any additional resource found in this area will be its economic haulage distance to the Lady Annie SX-EW plant.
The company says there are a number of ‘strong’ copper oxide exploration targets across the WTA that are scheduled for exploration in 2023 with priority exploration targets within the WTA include the Drifter Prospect Area, Lady Agnes, New Hope, Galah Syncline, Anthill region, and Glencore JV.
Austral says the Drifter Prospect is located 15km north-northeast of Lady Annie and hosts multiple historic prospects including Drifter, Kechenaj and Busy Bee where recent rock chip sampling has assayed results up to 16.05% Cu.
The Lady Agnes prospect is located 15km due north of the Lady Annie copper mine, and the target in this prospect has significantly lower exploration maturity than the Drifter-Kechenaj area but hosts many of the features necessary for copper mineralisation and is considered prospective, and the prospect is located within the Gunpowder Formation and hosts a 1,800m long with more than 100ppm Cu soil anomaly confined between 2 north-northeast trending structures.
The company says limited drilling has been completed at Lady Agnes South with the bulk of the copper soil anomaly remains untested by drilling.
Austral reports the New Hope prospect is located 10km north Lady Annie and hosts a 650m by 200m, over 100ppm copper soil anomaly within the upper Gunpowder Formation and the prospect has not been drilled and New Hope is a conceptual target that displays main important ore-forming characteristics but has only a ‘subtle’ supporting copper anomaly and there are favourable structural, stratigraphic and geophysical features present at New Hope.
The company reports the Galah Syncline prospect are located 7km southwest of Lady Annie and comprises a number of strongly folded anticlines and syncline within an area of structural complexity and the area is considered an analogy to the Lady Loretta Syncline and Lady Loretta sediment-hosted zinc-lead-silver deposit.
At Anthill, the most prospective known targets within EPM16244 include Python, Taipan, MaxEnt23, Lindsay’s Lament and Mercurius and there are favourable structural, stratigraphic and geophysical features present across EPPM16244 and the extent, complexity and depth covers across EPM16244 is considered by Austral to have hindered effective exploration for both copper oxide and copper sulphide.
At Glencore, an assessment of the copper oxide prospectivity of the Glencore JV (Russell Fault) tenure was completed using first-order exploration targeting vectors developed from existing CST and consultant works. Results enabled a first pass assessment of the JV tenure, identifying several exploration targets for further evaluation and this assessment provides a sound basis into which to integrate the further exploration data provided by Glencore as part of the JV.
The company says over 2023 the exploration program at the Glencore JV will include sourcing all relevant Russell Fault as well as determining the extent, vintage and quality of data relevant to copper oxides and identifying regional and local structures with the emphasis on structural elements known to be prospective, and conductive field visits to prioritised prospective areas including mapping and geochemical sampling as well as reviewing and integrating copper oxide targets at Russell Fault.
Austral also reports it will be conducting exploration work at Lady Colleen, Flying Horse, Lady Annie, Investigator, Enterprise and Neptune.
At Lady Colleen the company has confirmed the presence of a continuous ‘high-grade’ core at Lady Colleen and the critically ‘high-grade’ core remains open along strike and down plunge, and the company will focus on understanding the controls on ‘high-grade’ mineralisation to target the next phase of drilling exploring the potential continuation along strike and down plunge.
The company says it will be undertaking a similar exploration program at Flying Horse exploring for additional ‘high-grade’ oxide and sulphide copper mineralisation with a focus on identifying ‘lower’ tonnage ‘higher-grade’ zones within the sulphide mineralisation.
At Lady Annie, Austral will be conducting exploration similar to that at Lady Colleen, exploring for additional ‘high-grade’ oxide and sulphide copper mineralisation with a focus on identifying ‘lower’ tonnage ‘higher’ grade zones within the sulphide mineralisation.
Austral says the Investigator Prospect shows strong geologic and structural similarities to the Mammoth-Esperanza camp, located 12km along strike to the north and there are numerous Cu anomalies with sparse drilling and each anomaly ranges between 800m and 1.2km in strike.
In 2022, Austral announced a completed maiden MRE for the Enterprise Deposit located within the company’s Eastern Tenement Area and the mineral resource is at a 0.7% Cu cut-off and to a depth of 85m below surface.
The company says the mineralisation is tested to over 200m in depth and reains open at depth, and ‘high-grade’ core appears to lengthen at depth, and the Enterprise mineral resource has potential to improve with further exploration and is adjacent to other current copper operations.
The Neptune Prospect, located within the Mary Kathleen Belt within the Eastern Tenement Area 55km west of Mt Isa and 60km north of Carnaby’s recent Nil Desperardum copper-gold discovery, and prior drilling here intercepted several copper mineralised zones in 2 locations within the Neptune soil anomaly north of the fault.
Austral Resources is a copper cathode producer operating in the Mt Isa region of Queensland focused on its Mt Kelly copper oxide heap leach and solvent extraction electrowinning (SX-EW) plant with a capacity of 30,000tpa.
The company also owns a significant copper inventory with a JORC compliant MRE of 60M tonnes @ 0.7% Cu with 420,000t of contained copper.
Images: Austral Resources Ltd & iStock
