American West identifies more shallow Canadian copper

Diamond drilling at American West Metals’ Storm copper project in Canada continues to unearth more visual hits, with four recent holes plunged across a highly prospective area known as 2750N extending the zone’s shallow mineralisation footprint.

The company says the first bore of its latest campaign intersected more than 74m of visual mineralisation, including a 15.3m package of breccia and massive copper sulphide material stretching across several intervals.

The three subsequent holes struck 43.7m, 65m and 59m of visual mineralisation included a breccia and massive copper sulphide blend running 24.5, 25.2 and 15m wide.

American West started spinning the rods at the project last month, sinking a pair of holes as part of a strategic play to define a shallow copper resource at 2750N.

Two earlier holes plunged at the operation last month struck more than 20m of visual copper sulphide material. After taking stock of all its results, the company says 2750N’s copper mineralisation appears to be open at depth and along strike – suggesting ongoing drilling could add significant weight to its potential resource.

American West says its new visual results are also aligned with historical drill hits and affirm its belief the area has the potential for a low-footprint direct-shipping ore, or “DSO” operation.

DSO is ore that can be shipped directly to customers after modest and economical processing that can include crushing, screening, sorting and blending. Recent work at Storm suggests American West could deliver an impurity-free DSO product with a robust grade of 53 per cent copper.

American West Metals’ Managing Director Dave O’Neill said:“Drilling at Storm is continuing on the 2750N Zone resource definition program and will shortly start on the exploration phase of the current campaign. This will test targets that are lookalikes for the 2750N Zone as well as deeper targets that may represent the potential source of the near-surface mineralisation.”

Historical work at the site has delivered an array of solid intercepts including 110m at 2.45 per cent copper from surface and 3.07 per cent copper from just 12.2m.

The company will continue to drill at Storm whilst it awaits assay results from its six diamond holes.

Ongoing work at 2750N will target far eastern and western extensions of the ground’s mineralisation and test a raft of previously outlined electromagnetic conductors that are speckled around the tenure.

Despite the price of copper suffering a dip in form this year, its outlook remains bullish amidst a strong global push to seek out low carbon energy solutions.

Investment banking group Goldman Sachs previously stated demand for the commodity could grow nearly 600 per cent to 5.4 million tonnes by 2030.

Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@businessnews.com.au