Adelaide Resources maintains copper focus
THE CONFERENCE CALLER: Speaking at the 2013 Australian Copper Conference in Brisbane, Adelaide Resources (ASX: ADN) managing director Chris Drown described his company to the audience as an, “explorer with a very tight commodity focus on copper-gold”.
Adelaide Resources has projects located in the Northern Territory, South Australia, and Queensland.
Source: Company presentation
With a number to choose from, Drown concentrated his presentation in the company’s Moonta copper-gold project on the Yorke Peninsula in South Australia.
Mines at Moonta were part of the historic copper triangle, which also included mines at Kadina as well as smelting and export facilities at Wallaroo.
“We have a very simple goal at Adelaide Resources and that is to turn the triangle into a figure with more sides,” Drown said.
The Moonta project has a long history of exploration conducted by major mining companies including Western Mining, Mount Isa Mines and BHP Billiton (ASX: BHP).
All the previous exploration data is available to Adelaide Resources, which intends working back through the historic data hoping to find some value.
“If we had to go and repeat all of this work it would cost us tens of millions of dollars,” Drown said.
“That’s the advantage we have with this old data; it will probably cost us a couple of hundred [thousand dollars] to capture digitally, but compared to doing it all again, that’s very, very cheap and a very good investment.”
The Moonta project sits within a belt that is totally pegged – where ownership is dominated by the world’s largest copper producers.
The depth of cover at Moonta averages around 10m and is the shallowest within the region, which Drown indicated allowed for cost efficient exploration using technology such as geochemistry, which is not able to be used as efficiently at deeper deposits.
Adelaide Resources is conducting a second program of aircore drilling (Stage Two) at its wholly-owned Alford West prospect, located within the Moonta project.
The Stage Two drilling is following on from the company’s first program at the prospect, which returned a number of encouraging copper-gold intersections.
The new round of drilling is to consist of around 90 new holes with the aim to:
Extend drill coverage of the target zone along strike;
Conduct infill drilling on existing traverses to allow confident interpretation of lode dips; and
Obtain samples from areas of historic drilling to present samples for gold assay.
To date, Adelaide Resources has completed 23 Stage Two holes,upon which it has conducted Field Portable X-Ray Fluorescence (FPXRF) analysis of samples from these holes, which the company says has indicated the presence of intervals of copper mineralisation in a number of the new holes.
“We have analysed the surface soils, contoured the results up and we can see we have a lovely big copper anomaly, which basically coincides with the historic augur anomaly,” Drown said.
“We are using that information, plus the augur drilling, to design the next round of drilling, which is currently in progress.”
Drown finished his presentation by highlighting a couple of other prospects within the company’s tenement package it considers having potential.
The first of these is the Willamulka prospect, located 10km north east of Kadina.
Willamulka is a shallow 550m-long coherent zone of copper and gold mineralisation open at depth.
The Paskeville prospect is a shallow 400m-long coherent zone of copper mineralisation open at depth and along strike 15km east of Kadina.
Recent drilling conducted at Paskeville has defined a steeply north dipping 50m-wide zone of copper mineralisation.
The Wombat prospect is located 10km north east of Wallaroo, where recent drilling returned encouraging intersections of copper in a large shear zone.
“There’s a whole cluster of copper deposits in this area,” Drown said.
“It becoming clear to us that Moonta clearly has exceptional prospectivity for shallow copper-gold deposits.
“What we believe we can do here is build a project-wide resource base.
“We are starting to see this inventory emerge, but we do need to be persistent and keep working here.”