Rome Resources Plc (AIM:RMR) earlier this week announced the restart of drilling activities at its Kalayi and Mont Agoma tin projects, following a successful capital raise of just under £2 million.
The company told investors that drilling is set to begin by the end of the month, with a focus on high-priority tin targets. Two rigs will be deployed to explore deeper extensions of known mineralisation. This follows a drilling pause after the release of its maiden resource estimate in November.
CEO Paul Barrett talked with Proactive about the company’s latest financing and exploration plans at Kalayi and Mont Agoma.
Here, we take a closer look at the chat.
Proactive: Paul, it's good to see you again. How are you?
Paul Barrett: Very well, thank you. Thank you, Steve.
Proactive: Yeah. So the company out with news today talking about raising just under £2 million in order to facilitate a drill program. So, let's talk about timing right now. Tell me a bit about the financing and why the need for it now.
Paul Barrett: Well, we've been drilling ever since the RTO, which was due back in July of last year. So we were drilling all the way through until August. And then we did the work on the maiden resource that came out in November. We've had the drilling crews on standby, waiting to get back in, and also the helicopters being on the big survey.
So there was a good reason for having that gap. But now everything's ready to roll again. We've taken the opportunity—there was quite a lot of interest in the fundraise, quite a lot of interest in the tin story in general at the moment. It’s quite good. So, we're going to be drilling a very focused program, and we're going to start by the end of the month with two rigs to start with.
Proactive: Yeah. Tell me a bit about the focus of it, because these are really high-priority targets you're looking at.
Paul Barrett: They are. That’s right. So there are two discoveries. Kalayi is pure tin, and it’s three steeply dipping zones that have been identified with really quite high grades. I mean, we’re seeing some of the narrower intercepts up to about 11 or 12% tin. So, there’s some quality tin mineralisation in there.
We know from the Alphamin mine, the Mpama mines, that the widths in these high-grade intercepts increase quite dramatically as you go deeper. We’ve only really been drilling the shallow part of it—on average, our intercepts have been about 80m depth.
So we’re going to go quite a bit deeper. We’re going to drill down to 250, maybe 300m and try and get into those wider intercepts underneath. At that high grade, it doesn’t take much to really increase the resource numbers.
And so that’s the focus there on Kalayi.
The other focus on Mont Agoma is the fact that, with one of our last holes in the campaign, we encountered a new zone on the eastern side—a tin zone, pretty high grade, even though it was in the weathered zone at the surface.
We’re drilling now to chase that one as it plunges down to the southeast and also, at the same time, using the same model, we’ll drill deeper in Mont Agoma itself, get below the copper and into more of the tin. So there are two separate programs really, with similar objectives but slightly different.
Proactive: Yeah, I know that when you released the resource update, you were suggesting that there was a lot more to the project that you had to look at. And I guess that’s what really the story here is—that only scratched a small part of what this project’s about. There’s some size here, right?
Paul Barrett: Yeah, that’s right. We’re wrapping around the same granite system that the Alphamin project wraps around. They’re very similar. They had similar high grade but relatively skinny intercepts, shallow. And then deeper it goes, the closer you get to the granite, the closer you get to the source, there’s a lot more mineralisation.
It’s just a long trend. It’s a very, very close analog. So having drilled really the shallow intercepts, we’ve still got a long way to go. Alphamin is producing underground at about 600m. So we’ve got a long way to go to get there, but we think we’ll get these high-grade intercepts well before we have to drill that deep.
Proactive: Yeah. And lastly, you mentioned the tin story. I think it’s important to remind people just about tin and where it’s at and why this project remains such a viable one.
Paul Barrett: Yes. Well, tin is a relatively small market worldwide, but it’s very high value, roughly $37,000 a tonne at the moment. Very sought after. There’s no real replacement for tin in electronics and, of course, electronics with AI is a big business now. There’s a lot of demand going forward. All of the demand expectation is really strong into 2030.
And because it’s a small market, it does get hit by supply problems in Myanmar and Indonesia. It doesn’t take much to really destabilise the market. Alphamin next door—they’re producing, they’re paying dividends, it’s a really good cash machine. So yeah, a pure tin play with high grades is definitely quite compelling.
Proactive: Absolutely. Paul, thank you so much. Good update. Good luck on the financing and good luck on the drilling as well. And we look forward to hearing more about that when the time is right.