Dreadnought Resources (ASX:DRE) has commenced RC and diamond drilling at the Tarraji-Yampi Project, located in the Kimberley Region of Western Australia.
The long-anticipated drill programme to follow up on the 2021 Orion Cu-Ag-Au-Co massive sulphide discovery is finally here,” Managing Director, Dean Tuck, said.
“The intervening period has been used wisely to identify 13 Orion look-alike targets that are equal to or better than Orion at the same stage. These are all attractive drill targets that could lead to discoveries.
“Any additional discoveries close to Orion would define a camp scale copper opportunity at a time when copper demand is increasing on the back of electrification and decarbonisation.
“This is a high impact programme at the project that Dreadnought was founded upon. We are excited to commence this programme and look forward to what the drilling produces.”
The Tarraji-Yampi Project was off limits to exploration from 1978-2013, a period that saw over 50% of Australia’s mineral deposits discovered through the application of modern geophysical and geochemical techniques and an evolving understanding of mineral systems.
The region is known to contain outcropping quartz copper-gold lodes that were mined for copper on a small scale in the early 1900s and explored briefly by WMC in 1958 and ACM in 1972. The geological, geochemical and regolith of the project area contains many similarities to the Cloncurry District near Mt Isa and Tennant Creek. Dreadnought, for the first ever time, is applying modern exploration techniques and knowledge to discover mineralisation under the black plain soils.
In 2021, Dreadnought tested one of its first undercover geophysical targets at the Orion target.
In addition, it was determined that the black plain soil at Orion was only 1-9m thick instead of the 30-40 originally interpreted. This made for the application of auger sampling to provide a geochemical dataset to the geophysical datasets utilised to date. Since 2021, over 4,000 auger samples have been collected across Tarraji-Yampi.
The auger geochemical dataset has been transformational in understanding the lithostructural setting at Tarraji-Yampi and has resulted in the definition of 13 Orion look-a-likes with strong coincident geochemical and geophysical anomalies, with five containing outcropping gossans.
The 2023 RC and diamond drilling programme aims to achieve two main objectives:
- Prove the scale potential of Cu-Ag-Au-Co mineralisation at Tarraji-Yampi through the discovery of additional massive sulphide bodies.
- Test the depth extents of Orion where geophysical modelling shows mineralisation continues to at least 500m and gets stronger at depth. This testing is co-funded by the highly successful Exploration Incentive Scheme from the Geological Survey of Western Australia.
Upon positive results, the above samples will be collected for metallurgical test work.
These objectives will be achieved through RC drilling of the Orion look-a-like targets with follow up down hole EM (“DHEM”), and diamond drilling to test Orion at depth and to collect metallurgical samples. This programme is expected to run for 3-4 weeks with updates and assays throughout October to December 2023.
