Drilling commences at Dynasty Gold Project, Ecuador
Our junior exploration Investment Titan Minerals (ASX: TTM) has commenced drilling at its Dynasty Gold Project in Southern Ecuador investigating “a suite of compelling targets.”
Dynasty already hosts a “foreign resource estimate” of 14.5Mt @ 4.53 g/t gold and 36g/t silver for a total contained resource of 2.1Moz gold and 16.8Moz silver. We are keen to see this updated to a JORC resource, which will provide more confidence in the actual resource, and which additional drilling will provide.
Dynasty’s nine kilometres of strike is split into three main prospects: Papayal, Iguana, and Cerro Verde. This campaign follows on from extensive work over the past several months by TTM’s technical team to better understand the vein and porphyry systems - in particular at Cerro Verde - through systematic surface mapping and diamond drill core relogging. This has led to the creation of a new, integrated and robust 3D geological model of the system.
Utilising the new model, this drilling campaign focuses on the Cerro Verde prospect, and tests:
- Depth extensions to high grade epithermal gold at Brecha-Comanche area;
- Lateral and depth extensions to the large-scale Kaliman gold-copper porphyry prospect; and
- Potential overlapping epithermal gold and porphyry gold-copper mineral systems
We are particularly interested in whether mineralisation continues along strike and at depth at Kaliman, given that previous drilling returned several wide gold intercepts including 102.7m @ 1.48 g/t Au, 4.50 g/t Ag, 0.09% Cu from 46.5 metres.
The campaign matters as if further gold, silver and copper mineralisation is encountered, this has the potential to increase the size of the total resource at Dynasty. TTM will also be keen to identify higher grade sections of the system, which will enhance the economic viability of the project.
With drilling recommencing at Dynasty, as well as programmes planned to follow up the recent promising results from the Linderos project, we like the progress that TTM is making towards delivering our Big Bet for the company:
Our Big Bet
“We want to see TTM prove up a $1BN plus copper or gold discovery in Ecuador which is so attractive that a mining major acquires the company.”
NOTE: our “Big Bet” is what we HOPE the ultimate success scenario looks like for this particular Investment over the long term (3+ years). There is a lot of work to be done, many risks involved - just some of which we list in our TTM Investment memo. Success will require a significant amount of luck. There is no guarantee that our Big Bet will ever come true.-
What’s next?
The drilling campaign at Dynasty will likely run 6- 8 weeks, and so we could anticipate assays in the following quarter.
We also would keep an eye out for updates to the next round of drilling at Linderos, and in particular the Copper Ridge prospect, where several wide Cu intercepts were drilled late last year.
