American West Metals has added rich veins of critical and base metals to its West Desert project in Utah, for the budget price of simply resampling its historical drill core at the emerging US play.
The company’s decision to assay previously unsampled sections of core has paid off handsomely, returning outstanding peak values of 155 grams per tonne (g/t) indium, 40.4g/t gallium and a whopping 1065g/t silver.
The base metals weren’t left behind either, with assays hitting up to 9.5 per cent zinc, 2.34 per cent copper and 9.9 per cent lead at the growing polymetallic deposit.
The results from an 1155-sample program taken from 18 historical holes have successfully expanded and improved several known mineralised intersections, highlighting the potential to both upgrade and grow the project’s existing mineral resource estimate.
One previously recorded intercept of 13.2m at 9.5 per cent zinc has now been expanded to a much broader 22.6m zone grading 5.9 per cent zinc.
In another hole, a 1.2m hit at 1.55 per cent copper was stretched out to 3.6m at 1.22 per cent copper, all the while filling in gaps for critical metals such as indium, for which only 35 per cent of the historical drill core was ever assayed.
The news lands at a time when the US government is aggressively linking mining to defence and supply-chain resilience, with a recent White House move adding critical mineral projects to a federal permitting fast-track.
That makes a project in a low-risk jurisdiction such as Utah, with its particular mix of indium, gallium, copper and zinc, more strategically relevant to Washington than ever before.
American West Metals managing director Dave O'Neill said: “The latest results continue to demonstrate the outstanding potential of the West Desert Project as a significant US source of critical minerals. The confirmation of very high-grade critical metal and base metal mineralisation from previously unsampled historical drill core highlights the substantial value still to be unlocked within the project and provides a clear pathway to both expand and upgrade the existing Mineral Resource Estimate.”
The West Desert deposit already hosts an impressive JORC-compliant resource of 33.7 million tonnes containing zinc, copper, silver, gold and a significant inferred resource of 670,000kg of indium at 20g/t. The project is widely touted as containing the biggest undeveloped indium resource in the United States, a designation that carries increasing weight in today’s geopolitical climate.
American West appears to be well aware of West Desert’s strategic importance, recently engaging in discussions with key US Government officials at the White House Complex regarding the project’s development potential.
While the company breathes new life into old data, it says new exploration is still roaring away in the background.
The second deep diamond drill hole of its 2026 campaign is now complete, with a third underway at its latest step-out discovery beyond the West Desert resource. American West says a second rig has also been secured to accelerate the growing success of its program.
Impressively, the company also believes there is a unique opportunity to process mine waste dumps across its historically mined Utah tenure.
American West says that old-timers were only after zinc, lead and silver, with sampling showing the spoils remain amongst the lower grade dumps, including indium, gallium and germanium.
The US government is now offering funds to rehabilitate old mine sites and management sees a potentially significant early-stage win where it could get paid to remove the waste and then make money processing it.
With Washington increasingly focused on domestic supply chains for the minerals that power modern technology and defence, American West’s work in Utah could be getting interesting.
Unlocking payable metal from an already-drilled core can be one of the cheapest ways to add value in mining, rather than spending millions of dollars and months of effort drilling new holes.
It seems American West is proving that sometimes the best place to find something new is by taking a closer look at something old. With assays from its recent massive step-out hole expected in a few weeks and West Desert turning up critical minerals in every direction, the project could be accelerating towards production at a rate of knots in no time.
Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@businessnews.com.au
By Andrew Todd
