Impact Minerals is gearing up to get back onto its ground in NSW to explore for look-alikes to Alkane’s recent revered Boda porphyry copper-gold discovery that lies just north of Impact’s ground in the highly sought-after Lachlan Fold Belt. The company is now waiting on assays from recent reconnaissance rock chip sampling to hone the next round of soil geochemistry and geophysics exploration surveys at its Commonwealth Project near Dubbo.
Impact said it has identified four targets along trend with Alkane’s Boda-Kaiser discovery with the Boda South target located only 5km from Alkane’s recent hit. It also has a fifth target in the area known as Gladstone that is on trend with Magmatic’s recently announced Lady Ilse target.
The market excitement around Alkane and the Boda prospect stems from an uber-large drill intersection at Boda of 502m grading 0.48g/t gold and 0.2% copper from 211m, including 12m at 3.28g/t gold and 0.67% copper from 419m. Alkane management also said that the adjacent Kaiser prospect returned strong grades from shallow depths of less than 25m below surface.
Elsewhere in its portfolio, Impact is planning another round of drilling this year at its high-grade palladium-platinum-rhodium-nickel-copper Broken Hill project. Drilling is planned in the second and third quarters this year to follow up on some exceptional grades that were returned from an intersection at its Red Hill target and a high-grade intersection from its Platinum Springs prospect.
One multi-mineral stand-out intercept from Red Hill returned 1.2 metres at nearly 9 ounces per tonne palladium, 10.4 grams per tonne platinum, 10.9 g/t gold, 7.4% nickel, 1.8% copper, 19 g/t silver, 0.5% cobalt, 4.6 g/t rhodium, 7.2 g/t iridium, 5.6 g/t osmium and 3.1 g/t ruthenium. Impact also said that 12 out of 13 holes at Redhill returned robust widths and grades of similar mineralisation within 70m of surface.
Impact Minerals Managing Director, Dr Mike Jones said: “The Company is busy designing drill programmes at Red Hill and other prospects at Broken Hill to follow-up the exceptional grades discovered in our earlier work there. This includes drilled grades of up to 250 g/t or nearly 9 ounces per tonne of palladium, together with very high grades of platinum and even exceptional levels of the rare PGMs, rhodium, currently at US$9,500 per ounce, osmium, iridium and ruthenium.”
“At Commonwealth, Impact has identified five targets close to the recent Boda-Kaiser discover with potential for porphyry copper-gold mineralisation. We are awaiting assays from rock chip samples to help prioritise follow-up work which will include soil geochemistry surveys and ground geophysics to identify targets that will be drilled after Broken Hill.”
The Boda discovery drove Alkane’s share price from a low of around 38c back at the beginning of September 2019 to a peak price of $1.03 early this month. The market will be watching Impact closely to determine if it can even get a sniff of a drill hole that looks anything like Boda.
And it seems that the market meerkats have already taken note with Impact’s share price doubling in the last week from just point four of one cent to 1.4c a share.
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By Matt Birney
