Transcription of The Stock Network Interview with Tennant Minerals (ASX:TMS) CEO, Vincent Algar
Lel Smits: Tenant Minerals is a mineral exploration business advancing its highly prospective Barclay Copper and Gold project in the Northern Territory, which already hosts the high-grade copper discovery known as Bluebird. The company recently identified a significant copper in ironstone anomaly from a review of historical drilling that shows geological similarities to Bluebird. Joining me to learn more is Tenant Minerals CEO Vincent Algar. Vincent, welcome back to The Stock Network.
Vincent Algar: Good to be back, Lel. Sorry it’s taken so long.
Lel Smits: Yes, I’m thrilled you’re here for the latest update and I was wondering if you can start by explaining the significance of the newly identified Bluebird East anomaly and its similarity to your Bluebird discovery.
Vincent Algar: It’s a great opportunity for us and we’re glad to be able to get the summary of our interpretation out into the marketplace. The important thing about Bluebird East is that it presents as a Bluebird target for us.
If you know about the Bluebird discovery, it’s a high-grade copper and gold discovery in the Tenant Creek area. It’s one of the only ones that’s been happening, I believe, this century, to quote one of my other colleagues. Really exciting to be able to expand this.
We’ve always believed that there’s more to the Bluebird trend than we’ve found. What it presents as is we started looking at the copper and gold grades in historical drilling along Strike and we wanted to see what we were seeing in these old Bluebird East holes were analogous to what we saw about Bluebird because Bluebird is quite unique in that it’s completely blind. When we say that geologically, we mean that you couldn’t see it from the surface.
It’s not totally obvious to someone on the ground. There’s not hobs of copper sticking out the ground, but we know from our other drilling that it’s below there. What tells us that there’s a Bluebird underneath? What’s lying underneath us? This anomaly is important because we then compared apples with apples in the top 50 metres of the drilling and the geochemistry came up in the same quantum.
That’s really important. That’s what we tried to outline in the announcement. It’s important because it gives us a really exciting drill target that opens up opportunities below that.
Lel Smits: Excellent. Looking now perhaps more closely at historical drilling at Bluebird East, can you tell us about the past drilling there and also what the review of the historical shallow drilling results has actually identified now?
Vincent Algar: There’s no drilling below 50 metres of depth and that’s really important. What we’ve done at Bluebird is we went below 50 metres and we went down to where the ore body is.
If we look apples for apples, if we look in the top 50 metres above Bluebird and we look in the top 50 metres above Bluebird East, the quantum of the copper anomalism in that 1 to 300 ppm level is quite distinct from the rocks to the east and west of it. It stands out very clearly that it’s an anomaly worth chasing. The important thing about that historical drilling is that it’s shallow.
It’s very widely spaced. It gives us a target that is of a similar size, if you like, to the Bluebird target that sits above the main Bluebird already, which we subsequently discovered by deeper drilling. That’s really the key story here, is what shallow drilling is there tells us the story, but there’s no deep drilling and that’s really exciting.
It also sits just a long strike, about 350 metres to the northeast of the main Bluebird discovery. The idea that it’s related in some way is really important and we see that with its relationship with the structural data and the geochemistry and the geophysical data. They’re in the nearby cousin area, which is really what you want them to be.
Knowing that we’ve got this all important information for shareholders is that there’s an ore body that’s been discovered, a hybrid copper gold ore body at Bluebird. Really what we’re looking for is that it’s friends, if you like, a long strike.
Lel Smits: Absolutely, when it comes to your focus for the year ahead, how do these drill results from Bluebird and the identification of the Bluebird East anomaly influence your exploration focus for the year ahead? What do we want to do?
Vincent Algar: We want to make sure that we can follow this up. We want to make sure we can get in there and get some deeper holes, those below 50m holes, below that weathering surface, that oxidation surface, get in there and see if what the anomaly is telling us at surface is indeed similar to Bluebird. That’s super exciting news for shareholders and investors who want to get involved with the copper gold discovery.
That’s why we’re there after all. That allows us to start planning for that and then start looking, learning what we learn from this and start looking further afield for other anomalies in the shallow drilling. Then it sets us up to do much more intense shallow drilling along strike.
Obviously, we want to follow up Bluebird drilling itself. We recently completed a round on that and we’ve learned a lot from that particular round. We want to be able to follow that up because Bluebird itself is still there.
The holes we drilled previously closed off a few angles for us but left us a whole bunch of angles still open. We want to go back and enlarge that old body because it’s really a good body of mineralisation.
Lel Smits: It’s great to see the progress since we last spoke and look forward to more news ahead for Tennant Minerals. Thank you, Vincent.
Vincent Algar: Thank you.
Ends