Empire Metals Ltd (AIM:EEE, OTCQB:EPMLF) this week released encouraging results from an air core drilling campaign at its Pitfield project.
The company said the results were the first from using air core drilling as an alternative to reverse circulation and diamond drilling, offering quicker and lower-cost operations.
Managing director Shaun Bunn joined the Proactive studio to give us an update.
Proactive: Shaun, very good to speak with you.
You're out with results from the air core drilling program at your Pitfield project, which you say are the next step in developing a globally significant titanium resource.
So it sounds very positive?
Shaun Bunn: We were really pleased with the results. This is the first time we had used air core as an alternative to the reverse circulation work we've done in the past.
We've done diamond drilling. Air core has a distinct advantage in the sense that it's very quick, much lower cost.
The results that we received were very encouraging. I think that sets us up for a really big program in the next phase.
Literally, in the next couple of months, we will be back on site with those rigs.
Proactive: You do say in the release that you further defined widespread and continuous, high grade titanium dioxide through that air core drilling, Shaun?
Shaun Bunn: Yeah. Well, this is drilling now on a 100 x 100 metre grid. That's something that wasn't achieved before given the size of this anomaly.
This giant ore body spreads over 40km. You can't drill out all of the anomaly on 100 by 100, but this particular area we focused on, which are the high-grade, heavily oxidized, weathered caps that sit within the two targets at Cosgrave and Thomas.
We were really keen to get a detailed analysis of that area. The 100 metre by 100 metre grid has done that. We have now over 70 tonnes of metallurgical sample, which is going to allow us to upscale our metallurgical test work.
That was the purpose of the air core rig in the first place, to get these big bulk samples.
Proactive: Shaun, drilling at Pitfield has now surpassed 22,000m across 202 holes. What's next as you move towards that MRE?
Shaun Bunn: Every hole is in mineralization. The continuity of the ore body is absolutely amazing.
We're certain now that we’re getting to an area where we believe we've got high-grade zones. These high-grade zones, based on the 100 x 100 metre grid, are fairly continuous.
So we're going to continue to drill those out.
Some of those grades are stellar — we're getting up to 18% TiO2. That’s much higher than the exploration target average grade that we released in the middle of last year.
We've got a high-grade zone that we’re focusing on. We know that we can drill this out extensively now with a combination of air core and some RC drilling.
We will be able to get that into a resource estimate.
Proactive: Shaun, I hope you'll keep us posted on progress as you move towards that.