WCE lays out growth and development plan for the old Elizabeth Hill silver mine
Our silver exploration Investment West Coast Silver (ASX: WCE) has just laid out its Growth & Development Plan for the Elizabeth Hill Silver Project in WA.
WCE’s Elizabeth Hill was once one of Australia's highest grade silver mines.
The project produced ~1.2M ounces of silver at an average grade of ~2,194g/t from just 16,830 tonnes of ore.
The mine shut in 2000 because silver was US$5/oz.
Today silver trades at ~US$81/oz..
And now, WCE has announced how it plans to get the project back into production again.
A few weeks ago, WCE announced a maiden resource estimate for its project for a total 2.8M ounces of silver at ~617g/t - all inside one big open pit.
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WCE was able to define the open-pittable resource with drilling done last year.
Now, WCE is running both a diamond and RC drill program looking to push the boundaries of the pit to the north and at depth:
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Drill results are expected over the next few months:
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In today’s announcement WCE said it would look to start mining the project from a “high-margin starter open pit”, then eventually look to expand that through the regional targets.
A reminder where WCE is at:
- Maiden MRE: 141kt @ 617g/t Ag for 2.8Moz (released April)
- At a 60g/t cut-off: 2.72Moz at 1,114g/t Ag which makes this one of the highest-grade undeveloped silver projects globally
- Sits on a granted Mining Lease, with historic production of 1.2Moz from 16,830t at 2,194g/t (~70.5 oz/t Ag)
- Mining stopped in 2000 because silver was at US$5/oz. Today silver is around US$74/oz.
We covered the maiden resource here: WCE defines "one of Australia's highest-grade silver deposits"
The "Starter Pit" WCE wants to develop
Today’s announcement makes it pretty clear - WCE’s intention is to get the project back online with a high margin starter pit that is one single ~130m deep open pit.
A low tonnage, high grade mine where WCE has already proven up to 90% silver recovery rates (so should be able to process with a relatively simple flowsheet).
WCE also made it clear that one of the processing options it's considering for the mine would be from the Radio Hill processing plant ~30km away (WCE already has an MoU in place with the owners of that plant).
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We should get an idea of the potential economics of the pit when WCE puts out its Scoping Study on an open pit mining operation (expected to begin in Q4 2026).
How about the regional targets beyond the starter pit?
A big part of the reason why we Invested in WCE was for the regional targets across its project area.
We Invested in WCE to see it drill those targets and (finger’s crossed) make a repeat Elizabeth Hill discovery.
It hasn’t happened yet, but with some more drilling we think there is always a chance WCE could get lucky.
WCE controls ~180km² of prospective area and is positioning Elizabeth Hill as just the first "pearl" in a longer string of potential silver discoveries.
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For now, WCE (understandably) is drilling the nearest to mine targets:
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With this round of drilling WCE will be looking to:
- Expand the resource footprint to the north and west
- Extend mineralisation below and to the south of historical mine workings
- Test for a new mineralisation "pearl" south of Elizabeth Hill
WCE presented at the RIU conference in Sydney this morning
We are in Sydney today for the RIU conference and will try to catch Technical Director Serge Smolonogov at the booth.
For anyone following the conference along from home WCE actually presented in the morning sessions today - if you go back to the morning session you can actually replay the presentation on youtube here:
(we have timestamped the link, if it doesn’t stick it’s around 2h:24min into the stream)
What we want to see next from WCE
Today, WCE released an updated presentation here.
It’s always good to see a Gantt chart showing what’s ahead in these presentations - a one pager on what to expect next.
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The three things we are most looking out for are:
- The RC drill campaign on the targets to the north of the Elizabeth Hill Mine (happening now).
- The diamond drilling going for at depth extensions to the Elizabeth Hill mine (started Mid April).
- Geophysics across the broader project area
And then all of that data rolling into what we expect to be an updated JORC resource before the Scoping Study before the end of the year, expected to get underway in Q4.
