WCE kicks off regional geophysics to hunt for silver mine repeats

Our silver Investment West Coast Silver (ASX: WCE) has started an IP and CSAMT geophysics program at its WA silver project.

WCE's project hosts the historic Elizabeth Hill mine, which produced 1.2M ounces of silver at ~2,194g/t before shutting in 2000 when silver was ~US$5/oz.

WCE now has a maiden resource estimate of 2.8M ounces at 617g/t silver on this asset, the highest grade silver project on the ASX.

IP and CSAMT are ground geophysics methods - IP measures how well rocks hold an electrical charge, CSAMT images structures at depth.

Together they let WCE test ~4km of the fault that hosts Elizabeth Hill, deeper than what has been explored before.

An earlier IP test over the historic silver mine lined up with the known mineralisation, so the method has been calibrated here against the existing resource.

The idea being that if geophysics results repeat, perhaps there is another Elizabeth Hill lurking below.

50% of the program is funded by a WA Government exploration incentive scheme grant ($114,312), so less cost to WCE for these works is nice.

Below is where the geophysics will cover, extending well beyond the current resource estimate and proposed pit shell outline:

(source)

The data will be used to rank drill targets for a regional drill program in H1 2027, hunting for repeat Elizabeth Hill silver "pearls".

This was one of the reasons we listed when we first Invested in WCE in August last year:

(source)

Should a second "pearl" be found, it may provide enough data and prove the methodology to search for more “pearls” along the fault line that hosts Elizabeth Hill.

WCE has planned drilling underway near the current resource, drill rig expected on site this week

Below is an overview of the planned drilling expected to continue to mid December, announced last week:

(source)

The final part of the upcoming drill campaign is what we are most excited about, that is the Elizabeth Hill Deeps drilling.

From recent drilling, WCE had a hit of 3m at 524g/t silver which hinted at a new zone here, so WCE is back to follow up and define it.

Here is how it looked from the hit back in July:

(source)

The plan here is a couple of holes to follow up and provide more drilling data to see if there is any more to this high grade hit.

You can see our coverage when that high grade “worm” was released back in July: WCE finds new 50m high grade silver zone below historic high grade Elizabeth Mine

All of this drilling is being done with the pending Scoping Study in mind, and there are two resource updates coming.

One in November from the recent drilling, and one in March next year (including the results from this program).

The Scoping Study remains on schedule for Q1 next year, and with grades well above most open pit mines, we are looking forward to seeing the economics at play here.

What’s next for WCE?

Here is WCE’s latest Gantt chart with what we can expect to see over the coming months from WCE: 

(source - WCE’s latest investor presentation)

So summing up, in terms of exploration the three things we are looking out for are:

1. Future drilling to upgrade the resource, including Inferred resources to Indicated.
2. Drilling looking for extensions including the deeper high grade 3m at 524g/t silver hit.
3. Testing of new targets plus geophysics across the broader project area.

And then all of that data rolling into what we expect to be an updated JORC resource estimate being fed into a Scoping Study, expected to get underway in Q4.

Here are the milestones we are tracking right now:

• 🔄 Updated mineral resource estimate (planned for Q4 - source)
• 🔲 Follow up drilling underway (Drill plan announced last week, rig to mobilise this week)
• 🔲 Follow up Mineral Resource Estimate (Q1 2027)
• 🔲 Scoping study starts
• 🔲 Scoping study results (expected Q1 2027 - source)