Two key facts about the Elizabeth Hill project in Australia, now being drilled by Alien Metals PLC (LSE:UFO):
- Nearly 2mln ounces of very high grade silver was extracted from the ground there, between 1998 and 2000.
- When the original exploration teams went into Elizabeth Hill they weren’t initially looking for silver, they were looking for nickel.
When they found the silver, naturally enough they zeroed in on it, given that the average grade ran at over 2,000 grams per tonne, and that the mine produced Australia’s largest ever silver.
But after that short and sweet period of mining at the end of the last millennium, a lot of questions were left unanswered.
And it’s those questions that Alien Metals is now beginning to answer with the inauguration of a new, seven hole drilling programme at Elizabeth Hill this week.
The programme will test some of the extensive historic data which Alien possesses, will aim to extend the silver mineralization and will aim too to show that the geological context of the silver includes a much more extensive mineralized system than has previously been known.
Alien’s chief executive Bill Brodie Good has several good reasons to be confident.
“As soon as they saw silver, they assayed,” he explains.
“The rest of the time they didn’t bother. But we have the old drill reports, and they are full of commentary on disseminated sulphides as well as the odd nickel report.”
With that in mind, the thinking inside Alien is that drilling could result in the delineation of a much larger mineralized system that combines nickel and platinum group metals with the existing silver.
Is this a certainty? No – that’s what the drillbit’s for. But the prospectivity certainly is attractive.
“We feel we’ve got the geology, the structure and we’ve got the historical information,” says Brodie Good.
“It’s incredible how much was done but not followed up.”
Or at least, not followed up till now.
It’s estimated the 650-metre campaign will take between 20 and 25 days to complete, and that from looking at the core Alien will be able to get a quick understanding of how the geology’s working and whether to consider follow-up work.
As for the assays, they may take longer. Australia’s assay labs are under the combined pressure of the complex coronavirus context and huge demand as the local exploration industry roars away.
But Alien has other options in the interim, namely an XRF machine.
“We’ll probably look at the XRF and see if we can match it to the historical data,” says Brodie Good.
And when the assays do finally come back, the benefits of the new tangible information could be highly significant.
“This is our inaugural drilling at Elizabeth Hill,” says Brodie Good.
“I think we’ll get a lot out of it. It will help us on the resource and the potential of the larger system.”