Great Western Exploration managing director Shane Pike has a single ambition for his next drilling campaign — and it’s not a modest one (reports MiningNews).
“To put it boldly and bluntly, we’re looking to make a once-in-a-decade discovery,” he said.
The former Equigold and Evolution Mining executive said the plan to test targets rarely seen on the books of Australian juniors was set to be a “career highlight”.
The company is about to put rigs on its Fairbairn and Yerrida North projects to drill targets off its own back.
Great Western has developed and refined the prospects by itself; no joint venture partner is paying an earn-in, and no big brother has an option to step in on any success.
It’s a roll of the dice for a company with less than $4 million cash and a market capitalisation of around $22 million — the kind of high-risk, high-reward gamble that can make or break a company, but you don’t make big discoveries without taking a shot.
Pike said he and his fellow directors had such a high conviction that they were all shareholders, with the non-executive directors taking shares in lieu of a salary.
Pike admits he’s “a bit greedy” and wants to define world-class orebodies and send the company’s valuation into the stratosphere before considering any partnerships.
The program will first test three VMS targets where the Bryah and Earaheedy Basin meet.
Any one of these could deliver Great Western a ‘Degrussa-style’ copper-gold deposit — the same type of discovery that turned Sandfire Resources into a cash-strapped explorer into a successful miner, now operating on three continents with a $4 billion market capitalisation.
The rig will then test two anomalies in the Yerrida Basin with similarities to Rio Tinto’s world-class Winu discovery in WA’s Paterson province.
All greenfield targets in underexplored areas have transformational potential if geology plays ball.
Pike said Great Western had sweated the assets, and all prospects were at a point where drilling was the only thing left to do.
Fairbairn is remote, 900km north of Perth on the northern edge of the Yilgarn Craton, with most of the past exploration completed during the 1990s diamond push.
Great Western has refined eight airborne targets to three priority Degrussa-style volcanic-hosted massive sulphide prospects with ground surveys.
The isolated and discrete bedrock conductors are modelled between 80m and 190m below surface anomalies.
“We have mapped a previously undefined volcanic unit with copper and gold, which we expect is outboard of a Degrussa-style deposit at depth,” Pike said.
Perenti’s DD1 is expected to start drilling within about four weeks, after a short delay caused by recent rains.
The program is designed to be flexible, with diamond drilling planned to depths between 250-350m.
“If we get some colour, we have the permits and holes designed to keep drilling,” Pike said.
After Fairbairn, Great Western will look for “true monsters” by testing two 3km by 3km anomalies: Oval and Oval South.
“There isn’t a larger target that anyone will be drilling this year,” Pike claimed.
Oval was a 1990s prospect defined and drilled by Rio Tinto, which was “looking for a Winu before they knew it”, Pike said.
The prospect was defined as a conductive high using older-style Tempest airborne data that was great at shallow depths but “gets a bit fuzzy at depth”.
It was drilled to 232m encountering interbedded shales and siltstone. At the time, it was believed it was a false anomaly and Rio Tinto walked away.
Great Western picked up the area and completed more modern surveys in 2010, attracting Sandfire on the strength of the results in 2017.
Sandfire spent around $4.5 million, but after Degrussa closed and its focus moved to developments in Africa and Europe it withdrew.
The prospects are “perfectly” defined with coincident electromagnetic, gravity, and magnetic geophysical anomalies, which suggest the actual Oval anomaly was just 70m deeper than Rio’s drilling and is interpreted as a sulphide target or a buried intrusive along the major Ida fault and an interpreted growth fault, Pike said.
“If they had this data they would have drilled this target,” Pike predicted.
Great Western was valued at $22 million today, based on 6.3c per share.
