The heat was well and truly turned up this week when an unseasonably warm Autumn afternoon collided with three highly prospective base and precious metals stories at this month’s Investor Insight Rooftop Series event in Perth.
The heat was well and truly turned up this week when an unseasonably warm Autumn afternoon collided with three highly prospective base and precious metals stories at this month’s Investor Insight Rooftop Series event in Perth.
As has been the tradition since Cannings Purple moved into the heart of the CBD (and consequently lost its spacious balcony overlooking parliament and the city skyline) in 2017, Bob’s Bar served as the setting for a gathering of fund managers, brokers, analysts and journalists to hear a diverse trio of guest speakers putting their companies on display.
This month, snapshot presentations were delivered by the leaders of Todd River Resources (ASX: TRT), Musgrave Minerals (ASX: MGV) and Tietto Minerals (ASX: TIE), all three of which own advanced exploration projects in the gold and base metals spaces.
The event was perfect timing for Tietto, which earlier in the day released news of a 146 per cent increase in the mineral resource estimate for its Abujar gold project in Cote d’Ivoire, West Africa, to 1.7 million ounces.
The substantial increase covers only a small portion of a 70-kilometre mineralised corridor across three tenements at the project, with Tietto set to complete more than 20,000 metres of diamond drilling during the year ahead of a further expected resource upgrade by the end of 2019.
“Defining a higher‐grade zone of gold mineralisation at 2.1g/t containing more than 1 million ounces of gold from surface over 1.4km within the northern half of the AG deposit demonstrates the Abujar gold project has potential to become a very high‐grade, open‐pit gold mine,” Tietto managing director Caigen Wang said.
“The strong resource growth at AG and APG from limited drilling of 15,000 metres of RC and DD in 2018 demonstrates potential for rapid resource growth.
“Tietto’s aggressive drilling program for 2019 will see us continue with resource definition drilling as well as new target generation over the 70km strike of the largely untested Abujar gold corridor.”
On the same day, Todd River announced it had completed the first three holes of its 2019 drilling campaign at its Mt Hardy copper-zinc project in the Northern Territory, with initial results including 10.53m at 6.44 per cent zinc, 0.86 per cent lead and 0.83 per cent copper from about 500m.
Todd River has planned about 5,000m of drilling for 2019, which will be split between RC and diamond drilling that will predominantly target strike extensions and infill to its Hendrix high-grade copper-zinc discovery.
“Our 2019 exploration program is off to a positive start with some very encouraging intercepts in the first few holes designed to test extensions of the mineralisation at Hendrix,” Todd River managing director Will Dix said.
“We have a number of additional holes planned and will continue to drill to expand the mineralised footprint as well as work up our regional program.”
For Musgrave, the Investor Insight event was the perfect opportunity to recap its recent aircore drilling results from its flagship Cue gold project in WA’s Murchison region, which included 5m at 14.8g/t gold from 135m.
The latest round of exploration work shows high potential at the Lake Austin North gold system for further discoveries, with many of the scout aircore drill holes having terminated in mineralisation – highlighting basement targets for follow-up drill testing.
Musgrave managing director Rob Waugh said the latest results supported the company’s view that a large gold system was hidden below Lake Austin.
“This regional drilling continues to define geochemical gold halos to focus basement drill testing, with this intercept being the highest-grade intersected from aircore drilling to-date,” he said.
“The goal is to define all the individual high-grade basement deposits beneath this gold halo.”
Keep an eye out for an invitation to our next Investor Insight Rooftop Event, to be held on June 11.
