JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Australian minerals explorer Rex Minerals will accelerate its exploration efforts in South Australia’s Pine Point copper belt, after a successful capital raising.

“We now have sufficient funding and the right mix of internal and external technical expertise to do this, and we can look forward to further exploration success as we progress with this programme,” Rex MD Steve Olsen said on Monday.

The company has full ownership of a 60-km long section of the Pine Point copper belt, which extends along the east coast of the Yorke Peninsula, in South Australia. Rex believed that large scale mineralisation existed underneath the shadow sediments of the project, called Hillside, and that further copper discoveries, combined with a strategically favourable location, could deliver large-scale, low-cost and long-life mining operations.

Rex recently completed a technical review of the mineralisation discovered, to date, at Hillside, which concluded that local and regional geophysical programmes could help to discover extensions to the known copper mineralisation and to determine the location of additional high grade copper.

“The effective use of geophysical tools along the Pine Point copper belt is fundamental to the discovery of copper, as these are the best methods available to see through the cover of rocks. Now that we have made the initial discovery at Hillside, we are in a much better position to use the geophysics and to more accurately focus the drilling programmes along the belt,” said Olsen.

He noted that if speculation was correct about the effectiveness of these tools, then the discovery rate should increase dramatically along the entire Pine Point fault.