Solstice is led by geologist Nick Castleden, who most recently ran Apollo Consolidated, which was acquired by ASX 200 gold producer Ramelius Resources for A$181 million.
The company is chaired by Matt Yates, who sold OreCorp to Perseus Mining for A$276 million earlier this year.
“We’ve taken five companies through acquisition, resource drill-out, early studies and corporate action,” Castleden told the Resources Rising Stars conference on the Gold Coast last week.
“You can’t always pick a winner but we’ve picked a few in our time.”
Another element that makes Solstice stand out from its peers in the junior exploration space is the quality of its register.
Precision Opportunities Fund increased its stake in August to 9.6% after spending nearly A$260,000 buying shares on market.
Russell Delroy’s Nero Resources Fund holds 8%, while entities associated with successful prospector Tim Goyder hold 2.4%.
Solstice only has 100 million shares on issue and at a price of 19c this week, had a market capitalisation of $18.6 million.
However, the company has $17.5 million cash after recently selling its Hobbes project to Northern Star Resources for $12.5 million.
“We’ve got an enterprise value effectively of zero, which means the assets provide terrific leverage to any exploration success we might have,” Castleden said.
“It doesn’t make sense given we’ve got a few advanced properties on our books.”
Prime location
Solstice holds 2200 square kilometres of ground just 150km northeast of Kalgoorlie, known as the Yarri project.
Castleden said there were five deposits in the area with resources of more than 1 million ounces, being Sunrise Dam, Carosue Dam, Porphyry, Apollo Hill and Rebecca.
Rebecca was discovered by Castleden and his team at Apollo and is set to be developed by Ramelius.
Solstice’s tenements sit to the north of Rebecca but Castleden sees similarities.
“We found 1Moz under 20m of cover there and we’re operating in very similar terrane,” he said.
“We love this area because it’s soil covered which means there’s a blanket of soil on top of the geology which has prevented previous explorers from really understanding its true potential.
“Often in WA you don’t get any geochemical response whatsoever until you get into those grey [fresh] rocks so if you’ve been working on surface samples or shallow drilling, you may not find anything.”
Despite being so close to Kalgoorlie, the area is under-tested due to the soil cover.
“There are three big salt lake systems that slice through the area,” Castleden said.
“We’re crisscrossed by infrastructure – there’s haul roads going in every direction.
“We know we can deliver gold to either a standalone treatment plant in this area, because it’s clearly an area we can develop new deposits, or take it to a nearby mill, so we’ve got a lot of flexibility inside this large tenement package.”
Solstice is planning on a reverse circulation drilling program at two advanced targets, Statesman Well and Bluetooth, in the December quarter.
Statesman Well features a 1km-long zone of banded iron formation-hosted gold anomalism and workings.
Historical drilling has returned multiple 10-20m wide intercepts of 1-2 grams per tonne gold.
“It’s right in the sweet spot of what can be processed in this area,” Castleden said.
It’s a similar case at Bluetooth, where sparse drilling in the 1980s returned widespread hits of more than 1g/t gold.
The company’s greenfields targets include Bunjarra, which this week returned a standout result of 10m at 3.61g/t gold from 41m, including 5m at 6.48g/t gold.
Castleden said the result confirmed Bunjarra as is a genuine bedrock target that warranted immediate RC drilling.
Drilling at the Box Soak target returned 10m at 0.44g/t gold and defined an anomalous trend at least 800m in strike.
“Sometimes we get free kicks and at Box Soak, we got a free kick because there’s a neighbour who is doing a resource drill-out from north to south to our tenement boundary,” Castleden said.
Northern Star’s Coffey Bore and Moody’s Reward deposits sit to the north.
Castleden said focusing some attention on Box Soak was a “no brainer”.
“There’s no drilling south of our fence,” he said.
The company plans to be drilling continuously through the year with an aircore rig.
The aircore rig will shortly begin testing new soil-covered targets at Edjudina Range and Cosmo.
“It just takes one aircore hole to really change the company,” Castleden said.
