Published: Thursday, 02 November 2017
Coppermoly is planning the next drilling program on the Mt Nakru Copper-Gold Project on New Brtiain Island in Papua New Guinea. The program will focus on seeking to upgrade the inferred resource category while defining the size of the Nakru 1 and Nakru 2 deposits.
A revised estimate was calculated by Mining Associates in June 2017. Mt Nakru hosts a JORC-compliant inferred mineral resource of 29 million tonnes @ 0.92% copper and 0.22 g/t gold using a cut-off grade of 0.3% copper for 267,000 tonnes of copper and 208,000 ounces of gold along with 2 million ounces of silver.
Since both deposits have higher grades concentrated in the upper levels, and at shallow depths, an open-pit mine with conventional copper flotation processing is a likely option.
The company’s current exploration on New Britain includes a helicopter-borne Versatile Time-Domain Electromagnetic (VTEM™) geophysical survey by UTS Geophysics. The survey will investigate the mineral potential over the Simuku exploration licence area. The proposed survey will be approximately 928 line kilometres at 150 metre line spacing over all of the existing Simuku licence area.
To fund these activities, Coppermoly is undertaking a private placement aimed at raising about $2.87 million. The placement has been made to Shenzhen Beilite Jades Limited, a diversified private investment company specialising in precious metals, metal products and high value jades. Beilite has also invested in several gold projects in South East Asia.
Coppermoly has also announced the appointment of Dr Peter Crowhurst as its fulltime exploration manager. He has previously been employed as a senior and principal geologist for Nautilus Minerals for seven years.
Other technical roles have included engagement as senior project geologist with Teck Cominco focusing on copper-gold porphyry mineralisation in the Asian region, including PNG; six years as a research scientist at CSIRO; and independent consulting roles on many commodities including gold, copper, iron sands, lithium and petroleum. As a consultant Peter Crowhurst worked with Coppermoly in 2013 and as a structural geologist with Highlands Pacific.
Coppermoly director Dr Wanfu Huang said, “The appointment of such an industry leading geologist with exceptional geological and PNG exploration expertise, along with the $2.87 million capital raising, gives Coppermoly great impetus and will, in particular, allow us to advance our knowledge of all of the company’s primary prospects on Nakru and Simuku.”
For the full press release click here.