The Stavely Minerals Ltd (ASX: SVY) share price is flying higher today after the miner reported "another monster copper-gold hit" at its flagship project in western Victoria.
At the time of writing, Stavely Minerals shares are surging by 33.33% after being up by as much as 44.44% in early trade.
Stavely Minerals is a small-cap ASX mineral exploration company. It was formed in 2014 to acquire early to advanced-stage exploration projects with demonstrated high potential for additional discovery.
The company's assets are located in Victoria, Queensland, and Tasmania. Its flagship project is the Stavely Project in western Victoria where the company is targeting a Cadia-style gold-copper porphyry and Lake Cowal-style gold mineralisation.
Why the Stavely Minerals share price is spiking
This morning, Stavely Minerals reported new assay results from the ongoing resource drilling program at the Thursday's Gossan prospect, part of the company's flagship copper-gold Stavely Project.
The drilling program is aimed at uncovering high-grade, near-surface copper-gold-silver mineralisation over a significant strike extent in the Cayley Lode.
Standout results from diamond drill hole SMD087 in the northern part of the Cayley Lode include:
- 87 metres at 1.74% copper, 0.57 grams per tonne (g/t) gold and 20 g/t silver from 140 metres down-hole, including:
- 24 metres at 4.19% copper, 1.27 g/t gold and 53 g/t silver from 163 metres; and
- 9 metres at 4.09% copper, 1.83 g/t gold and 39 g/t silver from 218 metres.
The drilling returned individual interval grades of up to 24.1% copper, 10.05 g/t gold and 249 g/t silver.
Meanwhile, the base of the 24-metre interval hosted strong polymetallic mineralisation. This graded at 2 metres at 9.95% copper, 0.71 g/t gold, 107 g/t silver, 3.87% zinc, 1.18% lead, 0.89% nickel, 0.90% chromium and 0.05% cobalt.
In addition, diamond drill hole SMD085, the south-easternmost drill hole drilled so far in the Cayley Lode, returned:
- 23 metres at 1.07% copper and 0.11 g/t gold from 339 metres, including:
- 4 metres at 4.44% copper, 0.26 g/t gold and 7.9 g/t silver from 375 metres.
According to the company, the intercept in SMD085 increases the defined strike extent of the Cayley Lode to 1.5 kilometres, with the deposit remaining open along strike in both directions and down-dip.
Stavely Minerals noted that the resource drill-out at the Cayley Lode is progressing well and is now more than 50% complete. This paves the way for a maiden JORC Mineral Resource estimate targeted for the second half of 2020.
Management commentary
Commenting on these latest results, executive chair Chris Cairns said:
"We continue to be surprised by the incredible consistency and continuity of mineralisation in the Cayley Lode, with the results reported today including significant intervals of strong copper-gold mineralisation in the northern portion of the deposit."
"Due to the large overall interval of strong copper, gold and silver mineralisation in SMD087 and the significant gold grades in the high-grade sub-intervals, we consider this intercept to be on a par with the assays from the discovery drill hole SMD050," he added.
Mr Cairns closed out his comments by saying, "the drilling continues to reveal local variations in the widths of the mineralisation, as we expected from the outset, but generally speaking the deposit is behaving exactly as we had hoped – with the resource drill-out now well advanced and generating some excellent data that will feed into our maiden JORC Mineral Resource estimate later this year."
With a share price of 72 cents at the time of writing, Stavely Minerals' current market capitalisation is sitting at around $154 million.
