TORONTO (miningweekly.com) – The TSX-listed stock of NovaCopper on Tuesday advanced C$0.15 apiece after the company announced that it had nearly doubled the indicated and inferred resources at its Bornite project, in north-west Alaska.

The company had reported the results of the 2013 Canadian National Instrument 43-101-compliant core drilling programme and assays of previously unsampled, or partially sampled, historical Kennecott drill core.

At a base copper cutoff grade of 0.5%, the project was now estimated to hold an in-pit indicated resource of 14.1-million tonnes grading 1.08% copper, or 334-million pounds of contained copper, an 87% increase when compared with 179-million pounds reported last year.

In the inferred category, the resource comprised 2.3-billion pounds of in-pit inferred resources at a cutoff grade of 0.5% copper, resulting in a 73% increase in contained copper to 5.7-billion pounds, up from 3.29-billion pounds reported previously. The company also reported 3.4-billion pounds of below-pit contained copper at a cutoff grade of 1.5% copper.

"We are extremely pleased with the Bornite resource expansion. We have added more high-quality copper resources, at a grade of approximately 1% copper, for a potential openpit mine scenario," said NovaCopper president and CEO Rick Van Nieuwenhuyse said.

He added that at a grade of about 2.8% copper, the company had the potential for an underground mine scenario.

“Importantly, given that the amount of contained metal in the in-pit resource is insensitive to changes in the copper cutoff grade, the project could have great flexibility in mining selectivity during future mine planning,” he said.

NovaCopper said that the deposit remained open to expansion in the north, with Lower Reef mineralisation open over a 1-km-wide front along the north end of the property. The company plans to resume drilling in the second or third quarter of this year, with the aim of expanding the resource even further to the north and north-east.

The Bornite deposit is part of NovaCopper's Upper Kobuk mineral projects, located in the prolific Ambler mining district of north-west Alaska.

It is also intending to complete further testing of the partially sampled drilling from the Kennecott era, the company said.

"In less than three years, our exploration team has increased six fold the scale of the Bornite deposit. When combined with our high-grade (5.9% copper equivalent) potentially openpit resource at Arctic, we have nearly achieved our initial objective of defining approximately ten-billion pounds of copper equivalent resources in the district," Van Nieuwenhuyse noted.

He said that the scale of the Bornite mineralisation, which now measured 1.5 km along strike and 2 km down dip, had the potential to be of similar size and grade to the Mount Isa deposit of Queensland, Australia, which extracted 405-million tonnes of the red metal at a grade of about 2.12%.

NovaCopper shares closed 5.30% higher on Tuesday at C$1.39 apiece.