Transcription of The Stock Network Interview with Strickland Metals (ASX:STK) Managing Director, Paul L’Herpiniere
Lel Smits: Strickland Metals is a metals explorer with projects located in both Serbia and Australia. Its flagship project, the Rogozna Gold and Base Metals project in southern Serbia, includes four exploration licences. Ahead of appearing at Sydney Mining Club, Strickland Metals Managing Director Paul L’Herpiniere joins me on the Stock Network. Paul, welcome to the Stock Network.
Paul L’Herpiniere: Thanks for having me.
Lel Smits: Now, in mid-July, Strickland Metals announced that exploration for large-scale porphyry copper-gold mineralisation had recommenced at your Rogozna Gold project in Serbia. What does this phase of your ongoing porphyry copper-gold exploration program at Rogozhno entail? So the porphyry exploration that we’ve just kicked off is just one aspect of the project.
Paul L’Herpiniere: We’ve already got 4 Gold deposits hosted by Skarn Systems, but now we’re targeting the larger Gold and Copper porphyry systems. So at the moment, we’ve got 1 rig dedicated to exploring that system.
We’re currently drilling at the Jizerska Reka target where we’ve drilled 2 previous holes and hit extensive porphyry veining in those holes. We haven’t hit the mother load there yet, so we’ve got 2 holes currently planned at Jizerska Reka, and then we’re going to follow that up with a whole heap of ground geophysics as we try and generate some more targets further to the north.
Lel Smits: Excellent. So this phase of your ever-expanding exploration campaign is not just drilling activities related. If the outcomes from this exploration work meet expectations, can you outline what’s next exploration-wise for this part of the project over the coming year?
Paul L’Herpiniere: Yeah, so we’re currently doing, in addition to the drilling, we’ve got ground geophysical surveys starting with a gravity survey. So we’re about halfway through that survey at the moment.
Once we finish that, we’ll also be doing what’s called an MT survey. That’s called a magnetotelluric survey, where we’re searching for conductive bodies at depth. So in this part of the project, we’ve got a younger sequence, which has buried the prospective rocks.
So we need to somehow see through that cover sequence. So we use geophysics to do that. And previous experience shows us that whenever we do these geophysical surveys, we do get a lot of anomalies. Not every anomaly is related to mineralisation, so we then need to sort of prioritise those anomalies, and then we’ll look to drill test them towards the back of the year.
Lel Smits: Excellent. Now, earlier in July, Strickland Metals announced new assay results from ongoing diamond drilling at the Gradina Prospect, also located within the broader Rogozna project. What did these assay results reveal about mineralisation at the Gradina Prospect? And when will a maiden mineral resource estimate be announced for this prospect?
Paul L’Herpiniere: Yes, we’ve been releasing quite a lot of strong results from Gradina lately. Gradina is quite important for a number of reasons. Firstly, it’s the only deposit out of the four that we don’t currently have a resource estimate.
There has been about 30,000 metres of drilling now, so we’re getting close. But the key aspect of this deposit and why it makes it so important for the overall project is it’s the highest grade Gold out of all the deposits. Each of the deposits has slightly different metals mixed, but Gradina has 90% of the metals Gold, and therefore it’s also the highest grade and so because of that, it’s probably the simplest from processing as well. We expect pretty high recoveries. So it really is an important deposit because we can see a pathway here for the development of the project.
And we really believe Gradina will feature very strongly early on in the mine plan because it’s higher grade and has simpler processing. So really important. The drilling that we’ve been doing and the results we’ve been putting out showing quite a consistent geometry to the mineralisation, which is important. And as I said, some really high grades. We put out some results yesterday and the key one was about 20-odd metres at 7g Gold. So that’s a really nice grade for mining.
We’re really happy with it. We’ve still got another 10,000 metres to drill between now and hopefully October we’re aiming to finish, which if we can finish the drilling by October, we should have a maiden resource by either late November or early December.
Lel Smits: Fantastic. Thank you so much for the update from Strickland Metals and look forward to learning more at Sydney Mining Club.
Paul L’Herpiniere: All right. Thanks for having me again.
Ends