Solstice picked up the Nanadie copper-gold project near Meekatharra in Western Australia from Cyprium Metals this time last year for A$1 million cash and 3 million shares.

It was meant to be a complementary asset to Solstice’s Yarri gold project in the Goldfields but it’s recently taken centre stage.

Nanadie already had a resource of 40.4 million tonnes at 0.4% copper, 0.1 gram per tonne gold and 1g/t silver for 162,000t of copper, 130,000 ounces of gold and 1.36 million ounces of silver when Solstice acquired it.

“It’s a handy size already and we’ve got pretty clear avenues to make it bigger,” Solstice managing director Nick Castleden said.

Nanadie sits on a granted mining lease.

“We quite like exploring in WA … nothing’s perfect anywhere, but it’s a good start if you’re in flat country, on a mining lease and relatively close to infrastructure,” Castleden said.

Off to a flyer

Last month, Solstice shares spiked after the company reported the first five drill holes at Nanadie had intersected wide zones of disseminated chalcopyrite mineralisation with several higher-grade zones outside the current resource.

The best result was 62m at 1.55% copper and 0.66g/t gold to the end of hole from 256m, including 22m at 2.78% copper and 1.25g/t gold from 261m, the latter of which is the best hit to date in the system.

“We weren’t expecting to get the best-ever results in the first couple of holes, so that really changed everything,” Castleden said.

“It’s quite hard to find hits like that around the world. You don’t see them that commonly in Australia, so that’s what turned the lights on for us.”

Last week, the company followed it up with a hit at the north-western end of the deposit, which returned 106m at 0.86% copper and 0.23g/t gold from 201m to EOH, including 55m at 1.07% copper and 0.26g/t gold, including 24m at 1.42% copper, 0.34g/t gold and 11.4g/t silver and 11m at 1.53% copper, 0.35g/t gold and 5.6g/t silver; and 15m at 1.51% copper and 0.35g/t gold from 201m.

It’s given Solstice encouragement about the depth potential at Nanadie.

“We knew there was a lot of low-grade material there, but the deeper results and the step-out results of have exceeded our expectations, which is great,” Castleden said.

“We do wonder whether it’s getting better at depth or we’re tapping into plunging higher-grade positions that we need to understand, but the good news for us is at these sort of grades, you can really start to chase that material for a long way down, because it’s big volume.

“If we can keep finding more of this material, we’re not confined to an open pit environment.”

Very few holes in the historical database were un-mineralised and Solstice is yet to find the limits of the deposit.

“It’s very live, which is nice,” Castleden said. “We’re not drilling something that’s constrained and trying to look for a breakthrough.

“We haven’t missed yet. It’s quite hard to miss. It’s a nice change of scenery.”

Drilling to accelerate

Solstice has an RC rig returning to site later this month, which will be followed by a diamond rig to drill tails.

“We can easily see our way to drilling over 15,000m of RC and at least a couple of 1000m of diamond tails between now and the end of the year,” Castleden said.

“The takeaway is that every hole we’ve drilled has given us reasons to go and drill more holes.”

Solstice had planned more drilling at Yarri but has now reallocated that budget to Nanadie.

“I think the market’s telling us, and the results are telling us, that we’ve got to keep fleshing out this system,” Castleden said.

The company also plans to conduct some metallurgical testwork.

Last week, Canaccord Genuity analyst Paul Howard initiated coverage on Solstice with a speculative buy rating and A$1.85 price target, describing Nanadie as an atypical copper deposit.

“It is neither porphyry, VMS, sediment-hosted nor IOCG. It is hosted in a mafic-ultramafic intrusion but appears devoid of nickel and PGMs,” he said.

“We could only find three other examples of similar mafic intrusion-hosted copper-dominant deposits globally; Antofagasta’s Maturi and nearby Birch Lake deposits in Minnesota, and Ero’s Caraiba in Brazil; but even these have minor nickel and PGM associations underscoring Nanadie’s geological uniqueness.”

The plan is to release an updated resource estimate in early 2027.

Howard sees the potential for Nanadie to more than double in size.

“Overall, we see potential for 245,000t of additional copper metal to be defined at Nanadie for a total (risked) of 473,000t grading 0.6% CuEq inclusive of the current resource,” he said.

“This would place a future Nanadie in the top five undeveloped copper assets in Australia held in a developer, placing it among Caravel, Briggs, Maroochydore and Elizabeth Creek with the added benefit of grade and being virtually at surface.”