Transcription of The Stock Network Interview with Vantage Metals (ASX:VAN), CEO Will Dix
Lel Smits: Vantage Metals is advancing exploration across projects in Botswana and Argentina with drilling now underway at its Kalahari Copper project and high-grade copper, silver and zinc results emerging from the TMT project in Argentina. Ahead of appearing at Stocks on Location, I’m joined by Vantage Metals CEO Will Dix to discuss its project’s exploration strategy and catalysts ahead. Will, welcome to The Stock Network.
Will Dix: Thanks, Lel. Really good to be here.
Lel Smits: Pleasure to have you on and keen to understand more about the Kalahari Copper project in Botswana with drilling now underway at Kalahari and new targets identified through geophysics.
What makes the project prospective and also what are you hoping to uncover here?
Will Dix: Yeah, so we’ve been drilling in the Kalahari now for about three or four weeks. We have got a project that’s immediately north of the Comercal Hub, which is owned by MMG. It’s a large copper producing project.
They currently produce about 65,000 tonnes of copper and they’re doubling that over the next few years. So it’s a really interesting part of the world for copper exploration at the moment. We flew a large geophysical program, Airborne EM, got a bunch of magnetic data from that as well back in March.
And we’ve used some guys out of North America to process that and help us with turning that data into real information that we can use for drilling. So once we’ve done all of that work and we came up with a number of drilling targets, we started drilling at our Chinoga prospect. And the idea of this first campaign of drilling is to identify where we sit in the geological package.
So we need to be on a certain contact, which is the one that hosts the copper mineralization in the belt. And we’ve got, I guess, a cross-sectional area of about five kilometres. So there’s a lot of scope there to explore within.
And we’re seeing all the right rocks, all of the things we hope to see in the drilling program. And now once we’ve got that contact and we expect to get it any day now, then we’ll be able to move the rig along strike north and south and use a combination of the geophysics data and also our geochemistry that we’re collecting at the moment to vector in on where we think that copper mineralization will be. So the last part of your question in terms of what we’re hoping to achieve, ideally, you know, we’d love to make a discovery, but so would everyone.
But the intent of this initial fence of holes, this initial line, is to pin down that contact and understand where we sit in the package. And from there, we’ll be able to vector in on mineralization. And, you know, we’ve got a long runway ahead of us.
We’re going to be drilling there up till Christmas. We’ve got a number of different prospects to test. The one at Chinooga at the moment is front and center.
But then we have another one to the northeast called Makallamabedi, which has about 90 kilometers of strike that we can test. So that’s a big project, but one step at a time.
Lel Smits: Brilliant. And in terms of the TMT project, also that exploration upside in Argentina, recent drilling at TMT has delivered high-grade copper and silver and zinc mineralization. What are these results really telling you about what comes next here?
Will Dix: Yeah, TMT is a great project. It’s in the high Andes, just out of Mendoza in Argentina.
They’ve had a very heavy winter this year, so we might be delayed getting back in there on the ground. But last year, we drilled at Toro Central, where we had some pretty exciting drill results. We hit an intersection that was high-grade silver with some copper and some zinc.
And we’ve spent the off-season really trying to piece the geology together there. It’s difficult. It’s very structurally complicated.
There’s a lot of broken drill core that makes it a bit hard to piece it all together. But there’s definitely an opportunity there for us to be more aggressive with our drilling and to do a bunch more work there as well. Away from Toro, we’ve got a great porphyry copper target at Tambo South, where the company did some drilling a couple of years ago and hit copper in two holes.
Not economic grades, sort of 400 meters at 0.1 percent, so not anywhere near what we need to really, really get excited. But the take-home message for that, I guess, is we know there’s copper in the system there. Where does it high-grade? Where does it concentrate? So we’re working on putting that together as well.
Ideally, we’d like to be back in Argentina from an exploration point of view. Probably November is realistic, but we’ve got a bunch of things to do and watch this space on that.
Lel Smits: Well, thank you for the update from Vantage Metals and look forward to hearing more when you’re on stage at Stocks on Location.
Will Dix: Thanks, Lel. Looking forward to updating everyone then.
Ends