This is the first in a two-part feature series.
This article is a sponsored feature from Mining.com.au partner Belararox Ltd. It is not financial advice. Talk to a registered financial expert before making investment decisions.
To play in the big league you need drive, motivation, and ambition. To stay in the big league, you need the skill, determination, and a will to have an edge over your competition.
Belararox (ASX:BRX) is a junior exploration company taking on the big end of town.
It is being driven by the demand for raw materials as the world transitions to green technology, motivated by a strategic acquisition that helps fulfil its ambition to be a significant player in the market.
As Managing Director Arvind Misra tells Mining.com.au, the company has an adept skilled team in place that are determined to give the junior an edge among its now larger peers in Argentina.
With a market capitalisation of just over $22 million, Belararox has made a foray into a world-renowned mining region in South America that has been the focus of many global mining majors for decades.
To complement its flagship project in Australia, Belararox recently agreed to acquire the ‘highly prospective’ Toro-Malambo-Tambo (TMT) Base Metal Project in Argentina, which offers the company enormous copper-gold porphyry potential.
Belararox will shortly complete settlement under a binding agreement to acquire all the shares in privately held Fomo Ventures No 1, the owner of the TMT project.
Misra tells this news service the acquisition enables Belararox to pursue exploration in a ‘prolific’ mining province in partnership with an experienced and highly regarded team led by Jason Ward, a renowned geologist.
Importantly, the Toro-Malambo-Tambo (TMT) Base Metal Project has potential to host a big copper-gold porphyry deposit, in an area dominated by mining majors, which have been spending large amounts of capital on exploration and development capital for many years.
In essence, Belararox has joined the big league.
The MD explains: “It’s an extensive land package of 32,380 hectares in the Valle del Cura district in San Juan province, which is one of the best mining jurisdictions in the world. The zinc mineralisation we have here is likely to be genetically related to a porphyry system at depth.
And it’s a famous mining jurisdiction but what we have is unexplored targets with very high potential for hosting high sulphidation epithermal and porphyry deposits, and preliminary desktop studies show there’s enormous potential for these targets with conspicuous hydrothermal alteration.
“Every man and his dog that is camping and exploring there in San Juan province is trying to explore for the next big copper project”
Every man and his dog that is camping and exploring there in San Juan province is trying to explore for the next big copper project.”
As all rookies do when entering the big league, Belararox has undertaken its scouting report and completed due diligence. It has assessed its peers and competition and found a global mining behemoth hosts a large-scale and ‘high-grade’ deposit just down the road from TMT.
Misra explains that Lundin Mining Corp (TSX:LUN), a diversified Canadian base metals mining company with operations and projects in Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Portugal, Sweden, and the US, owns the Filo del sol project in the region. The company has received results from intersection FSDH055C, which returned 1,337.5m @ 1.33% Cu-Eq from 150m.
“This type of intersection here is once in a lifetime. So, this is a part of the world where you will find really big deposits.
We have a world-class team working on our project now. This could potentially be a company-making project. Because with porphyry systems if you do hit them, if you hit one, there’s potentially hundreds of millions of tonnes in a deposit. If you find them at 1% like Filo del sol, it can seriously add value to your share price and market cap.
From what we can tell, the rocks here at TMT are very similar to the nearby Filo del sol project in the region.”
“This type of intersection here is once in a lifetime. So, this is a part of the world where you will find really big deposits”
Following shareholder approval at a general meeting of shareholders held on 27 April 2023 and upon settlement, Belararox will acquire all the shares in Fomo, an unlisted Australian company registered to operate in Argentina. Fomo’s wholly owned Argentinian subsidiary company GWK Minerals is the registered holder of all 14 tenements that comprise the highly prospective TMT Project.
Since securing rights to acquire the TMT project in January 2023, Belararox has advanced exploration on multiple fronts at the Argentine project with assistance from Condor Prospecting.
Epithermal and porphyry targets defined
Prominent exploration geologist Dr Steve Garwin has been engaged to process, interpret, and report on Sentinel-2 & Aster Geophysical Imagery at the project. The analysis highlighted the potential of the TMT project, identifying various areas of interest and showing conspicuous anomalies in certain zones which are compatible with high sulfidation and porphyry type deposits.
Misra notes that the TMT project has 7 defined epithermal and porphyry exploration targets ready to be checked on the field. Each target is at a different stage – some are grassroots unexplored ground, other targets have surface sampling and mapping, and finally targets in an advanced exploration stage, where geophysics and drilling has been done.
In terms of the potential porphyry system in the region, early stage work shows that they appear to be separate but that could change over time.
“They might be linked, but at the surface we are seeing them as a separate system. It’s an area about 20km so it’s quite a large area.
The terrain is very mountainous but as you can see there’s a lot of activity there because of these systems. A lot of activity. But this doesn’t affect us much as it’s a very famous and well-known mining jurisdiction so there’s a lot of mining services firms working there who specialise in this type of terrain.”
“Our TMT project seems to be located in an underexplored gap between these 2 renowned metallogenic belts”
Other than proximity to Filo del sol, the MD says El Indio and Maricunga are renowned copper-gold metallogenic belts and host ‘world-class’ deposits such as El Indio, Veladero, Pascua-Lama, Ortigas, Taguas, Josemaría, Filo del Sol, Los Helados, among others.
“Our TMT project seems to be located in an underexplored gap between these 2 renowned metallogenic belts.”
Misra says Belararox has identified a series of targets labelled A1, A2, and A3, as well as B1, B2, and B3 which have been flagged for initial focus.
Number one mining destination in South America
The MD adds, the San Juan province has been ranked as the number one destination in South America for mining investments by the Fraser Institute, an independent non-partisan research and educational organisation based in Canada.
According to the Ministerio de Minería (Ministry of Mining), the province of San Juan is located at the foothills of the Andes Mountain Range to the west of Argentina. It occupies a total surface area of 92,789km-square and is populated by 681,055 inhabitants.
The Ministerio de Minería says San Juan has a geological mining potential that includes metalliferous and non-metalliferous metals as well as application rock. Large-scale metalliferous mining has been present for over 15 years. The mining ministry notes it is also the number one producer of solar panels for renewable energy generation.
Argentina’s government has been bolstering efforts to attract foreign investors to its mining sector and boost the country’s metals and minerals output.
The country is working to increase mining exports income to more than US$10 billion over the next decade, a figure which looks feasible given investment announcements say it reached US$9.3 billion in 2020 and 2021 combined.
Recent reports say Argentina’s mining exports hit historic levels in 2022, charged on by surging lithium income as Latin America’s third-largest economy targets profits from the metal integral to meeting soaring electric vehicle (EV) demand.
Misra says with this in mind, one large company has already expressed interest in the TMT project, however it’s still early days as Belararox will seek to explore the asset further before undertaking such considerations.
He notes that the world needs not only more copper projects to be developed into production but also large-scale operations, which are commonly found in this region of Argentina. A region Misra adds has access to infrastructure and where Belararox already has a camp set up on the ground with a team ready for action.
According to the Department of Industry, Science, Energy and Resources (DISER) March 2023 Resources and Energy Quarterly (REQ) publication, global mined copper production remained stagnant in 2022 hitting almost 22 million tonnes. This was up a marginal 0.8% from a year earlier.
Global mined copper production is forecast to grow 5.4% to almost 23 million tonnes in 2023, despite ongoing disruptions in major producing regions, in order to fulfil the demand by the growing electric vehicle (EV) market. Yet copper consumption this year world-wide is expected to increase by 2.1% to reach 26 million tonnes – a deficit of 3 million tonnes.
Misra adds: “Supply just can’t keep up with copper demand so there’s a real need for copper projects, large, long-life copper projects to come into production to meet the green energy transition.
If you look at BHP’s (ASX:BHP) deal with OZ Minerals (ASX:OZL) everyone, all the majors, they are all trying to increase and expand their copper footprint. This area here where we are within the San Juan Province is responsible for about half of the world’s copper.
Validating historical information
With the TMT acquisition, Belararox has secured and registered ground of more than 32,000ha in one of the most prolific sectors of the Andean range. The transfer of all tenements to GWK Minerals has now been registered with the San Juan mines department.
Misra notes that a desktop review of the project’s historical data with compliance to the 2012 JORC standard is underway. A technical due diligence expedition was made on the site by one of the company’s geologists with geologists from Condor Prospecting to validate the historical information.
A field trip was conducted in February 2023 to check the condition of the project’s main access track and historical campsite and both were found to be in good condition. A field trip was also made during mid-April to investigate the condition of the project’s northern access track.
The technical DD team, consisting of a Belararox geologist and geologists from Condor Prospecting inspected the available drill core for key mineralised intercepts of the Votorantim Metais diamond drilling.
Misra says, during the visit to the site the conspicuous hydrothermal alteration was evident from a distance and then confirmed upfront.
Disseminated mineralisation contained in sulphides was observed in the outcropping dacites, which are intruding sedimentary units. Of particular interest, the assay values across 133 votorantim rock chip samples produced significant geochemical anomalies for zinc-gold-silver-copper grades.
The main zinc mineralisation is located in the central and northern parts of the “central section” of the Toro target. The results show grades of up to 13.3% Zn.
Some 9 Environmental Impact Assessments (EIAs) comprising the whole TMT project have been completed by a consultant in San Juan province and have already been submitted to the mines department. The EIAs include repairing the access track, reinstating the historical campsite, building new access tracks to the northern areas of interest and an initial drilling stage of 12,000m of diamond drilling.
“On the zinc side, we kind of know what’s there but with the copper porphyry there are so many targets we need to really see what’s there”
Belararox will seek to launch a drilling program in about September 2023 and is currently prioritising where its drill targets will likely be.
The MD adds: “On the zinc side, we kind of know what’s there but with the copper porphyry there are so many targets we need to really see what’s there.”
In part-two of this series Misra outlines that in addition to the company joining the big league in South America, it is maintaining momentum with its flagship project and other assets in Australia.
Belararox has a 100% interest in the 643km-square Belara Project located in the Lachlan Fold Belt of New South Wales. The project includes the historic Belara and Native Bee mines that have been drilled to a depth of about 400 vertical metres and have massive sulphide mineralisation showing ‘excellent’ continuity and containing significant intersections of zinc, copper, silver, lead, and gold.
Belararox also holds the Bullabulling project which is a 49km-square tenement package in Western Australia’s Eastern Goldfields prospective for gold and lithium. The project is surrounded by notable lithium projects and prospects including Future Battery Minerals’ (ASX:FBM) Kangaroo Lithium Project, the historical Ubini Mine and the Red Panda Prospect.
Write to Adam Orlando at Mining.com.au
Images: Belararox Ltd & Ministerio de Minería
