Multi-commodity exploration junior Blina Minerals has exercised an option to fully acquire the shares of private Australian company Madacu Resources, after conducting extensive due diligence on that company’s large Maintirano copper project tenement holdings in western Madagascar.
Blina has reimbursed $200,000 for field expenses incurred by Madacu at Maintirano and will now issue 180m fully paid ordinary shares in the company to Madacu.
The company will issue another 120m shares to Madacu’s owners if it identifies at least four drill targets and a further 200m shares if it delineates a minimum indicated resource of 10 million tonnes grading more than 1.5% copper.
Blina now has the opportunity to earn an initial 70% interest in Maintirano from local company Mada Hanra by spending USD$2m on exploration over two years along with separate vendor payments of USD$128,250 and an option and exercise fee of USD$76,000.
The company can acquire a further 20% in the project after 24 months by paying USD$475,000 and a further USD$712,500 on conversion of selected Exploration Licences into Exploitation – or mining - Licences.
A final 5% interest may be acquired at Blina’s option for a final payment of USD$7.125m.
So why all the fuss?
The Maintirano copper project covers a strategic landholding of nearly 1,800 square kilometres on the central western coast of Madagascar, that contains at least 30 copper occurrences within basalt host rocks on this part of the island.
The tenements show extensive secondary copper mineralisation with copper carbonates, copper silicates and even native copper metal specimens being unearthed in the region.
The key exploration target will clearly be uncovering the primary source of the copper within the host basalts to potentially outline initial open pittable resources and perhaps, even underground resources down the track.
Blina’s technical due diligence work at the Maintirano returned very encouraging results with one sample registering 37.5% copper and 33ppm silver.
The company collected and assayed 59 samples from 15 remote copper occurrences with eight samples returning more than 5% copper during its second due diligence campaign on Madagascar.
Initial sampling by Blina had returned grades up to of 11% copper.
The high grade samples appear to coincide with steeply dipping veins that contain the secondary copper minerals malachite, chalcocite and cuprite.
Notably, samples assaying more than 15% copper were collected from three different locations over 10km apart at the project, which supports the theory of a larger-scale system being present in the tenements.
Management said that the recent observations and results provided further encouragement that mineralisation at Maintirano is not dissimilar to that at the Keweenaw copper province in Michigan, US, where nearly 5 million tonnes of refined copper was produced from ores grading between 1.5% and 3% copper over a 100 year period.
Blina is planning to evaluate the recent rock chip sampling results during the current wet season in Madagascar and obtain additional data including hypospectral images to assist in preparing proposed geophysical surveys and evaluate additional opportunities in the vicinity of the exploration permits.
In addition, the company will seek a service provider for the geophysical surveys and reconnaissance drilling programs, with the initial aerial survey planned for the first half of 2019. Depending on results, a follow up geological mapping and reconnaissance drilling campaign is then planned for late 2019.
By Matt Birney
