Impact Minerals (ASX:IPT) shares are expected to open higher after the company intersected a 1.2 metre thick massive nickel-copper sulphide unit within a 4 metre thick zone of mineralisation from 60 metres.
The discovery was made 20 metres beneath previous high grade drill intercepts at the Red Hill Mine shaft.
The Red Hill prospect is located some 20 kilometres from the Broken Hill Lead-Zinc-Silver mine in New South Wales, which has produced for over 100 years.
Red Hill was a previous small copper-platinum mine which operated from 1906 to 1937.
Previous drilling by Impact under the historic mine returned minor massive sulphides from 58 metres with a drill hole of 32 metres at 1% copper, 0.5% nickel, 3.9g/t Pt-Pd-Au and 10.6g/t silver.
Today's drilling details
The current drilling is part of a program underway at Impact's copper-nickel-platinum joint venture project.
Impact said that numerous spot readings using a hand held XRF instrument indicate grades of copper of between 1 and 5% copper and 2% to 8% nickel.
The XRF instrument has also highlighted minor metals that in previous laboratory assays have been indicative of high grade PGM mineralisation are also strongly anomalous.
PGM’s can not be measured directly by the XRF instrument.
The high nickel grades (XRF) suggest that the new zone is the down-dip extension of the Upper Zone.
The Upper Zone is still open at depth, and is in part coincident with an Induced Polarisation anomaly that is modelled to extend to at least 100 metres below surface.
The Lower Zone has not been intersected in this hole.
The company added that this is possibly because the mineralisation has a shallow plunge to the east and Hole RHD013 is in progress about 25 metres along strike to the east to test this.
Further holes are also planned to test the mineralisation further at depth and along strike to the west.
Analysis
Momentum continues to build for Impact Minerals, with the company's share price having increased by almost three times since March this year.
The company recently secured funding and technical support from cornerstone investor Squadron Resources (part of Andrew Forrest’s Minderoo Group).
Squadron has agreed to invest up to $7.3 million to fund the company’s aggressive exploration plans.
Perth-broker Patersons Securities has a Speculative Buy rating on the company.
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