L1M starts drilling at QLD gold and silver targets

Our exploration Investment Lightning Minerals (ASX: L1M) just announced that drilling is underway at its QLD gold-copper-silver project.

L1M recently acquired this project and will be the first company to drill test the ~12.5km of strike here and see if it can find repeats of the gold structures that were mined back in the 80s and 90s.

L1M will complete 1,300m of diamond drilling next week following up old results like:

We were mainly looking forward to the gold results from this project but we did notice there is some silver in those old intercepts.

So we will have one eye on whether or not the holes also have silver mineralisation.

(Source)

All of L1M’s drilling will be on parts of the project that have previously been drilled or mined but rarely drill tested below depths of ~100m…

So L1M will be looking to confirm those old hits (and fingers crossed find extensions to the mineralisation at depth).

We think that at L1M’s current market cap around ~$9m, results similar to those old hits could get the market interested in L1M’s asset.

Especially with L1M running a soil sampling program on the remainder of the asset, where there is ~12.5km of strike that hasn’t been drilled in the past.

L1M expects the soil sampling program to be run in the next week with results expected in 4-6 weeks.

The soil sampling will be what L1M bases its next round of drilling on.

Silver upside from this round of drilling?

We noticed L1M mentioned silver a fair bit in today’s announcement so we went back and looked at some of the old drilling data from its project.

We have noticed there were some decent silver grades from an announcement back in July along the Drummer targets.

Here is the old data with silver grades as high as 100g/t over 1m.

(Source)

Here is where those old hits were from, relative to where L1M is drilling now:

L1M’s first drill targets are going for gold (and silver)… but the project is also prospective for copper

While this first round of drilling will focus on L1M’s gold targets, we like the copper potential at the project as well.

L1M adjacent to the gold targets has three big porphyry targets.

This system potentially covers 16km^2 and a geophysics program conducted by the previous owners highlighted three drill ready shallow targets.

The targets were never drilled however (the macro at the time for copper and gold was much worse than it is today).

We are looking forward to seeing L1M work up the copper targets and put together a drilling timeline here too.

What’s next for L1M?

Diamond drilling program continuing on gold targets 🔄

Given L1M will be running a diamond drill program, it is possible we get some visuals fairly soon with drilling having started.

So we could see results start to trickle in fairly quickly from L1M.

Soil sampling program alone ~12.5km fault line 🔄

L1M mentioned in today's announcement that soil sampling would also form part of this program to rank more drill targets.

L1M previously stated that they expect assays from the soil sampling program to take 4-6 weeks, so we should see results from this soon.