Caerus Mineral Resources PLC announced "highly encouraging" results from drilling at the Troulli joint venture in Cyprus and said they enhanced the potential economic viability of all three targets at the copper-gold project.
The best recent drill intercepts included 1.4 grammes a tonne (g/t) gold over 22 metres, 1.1g/t gold over 30 metres and 1.0g/t gold over 20 metres, all from surface.
It said the indications are that drilling has delineated an economically viable gold oxide zone for near-term development.
In addition, recent infill drilling yielded compelling evidence that the sulphide zone continues at depth beneath the gold zone, Caerus said, with peak drill intercepts including 1.68% copper over 2 metres, 1.41% copper over 6 metres, 1.3% copper over 6 metres and 0.7% copper over 20 metres.
“The delineation of a potentially substantial copper sulphide orebody located immediately beneath the gold oxide zone has been an unexpected bonus,” said Caerus chief executive Martyn Churchouse.
Caerus recently entered into a joint venture agreement with Bezant Resources PLC covering Troulli.
READ: Caerus Mineral and Bezant Resources sign JV deal for Troulli copper-gold project
"We continue to make significant progress with our joint ventures and evaluation and resource development programmes,” said Churchouse, although he bemoaned the “painfully slow” turnaround in receiving results from the independent assay laboratory.
“It is little comfort to shareholders that we are drilling, trenching, and sampling at an impressive pace if we cannot back this up by sharing analytical results. We remain hopeful that the backlog will be cleared soon.”
Trench sampling of surface materials also continued to return notable pXRF results, with peak readings of 17.7% copper, 6.9% copper, 6.64% copper, 6.12% copper and 4.94% copper, increasing the potential to process these copper stockpiles during the early stages of mining.
“Shareholders will be aware that we have started to use the pXRF to generate preliminary results and, whilst XRF data is not as accurate as laboratory assay data, it does confirm the presence of copper and/or gold and therefore a high degree of comfort that we are targeting the right resources,” Churchouse added.
“The detailed work completed on surface materials at Troulli has far exceeded expectations both in terms of tonnage, and particularly grade.”
All the drill intercepts reported to date relate to mineralisation occurring at, or close to, surface and are conducive to low-cost mining.