JSE- and ASX-listed Orion Minerals will imminently start a diamond drilling programme on a high-priority target on the boundary of the company’s existing Masiqhame prospecting right and on the newly granted Boksputs North prospecting right, both based in the Northern Cape province of South Africa.
This follows the completion of a fixed-loop electromagnetic (EM) survey conducted in the area, which detected an EM conductor with nearly ten times higher conductance than a prior survey had detected in 2018.
Orion has been granted the Boksputs North prospecting right, which now affords the company access to test the strike extension of this target.
The company also has a SkyTEM survey under way at the Okiep copper project, targeting a high-priority area of 857 km2. The survey should take about six weeks to complete.
Orion MD and CEO Errol Smart says it is almost unthinkable that a district that has produced more than two-million tonnes of copper from sulphide ore with associated pyrrhotite has never been surveyed with airborne EM methods.
The Okiep copper project area is currently under option to Orion.
“The powerful geophysical tools that we are using will be targeting mafic intrusive bodies with high magnetite content, that we expect will be detected with natural magnetism and that will have small zones of conductive pyrrhotite content associated with copper sulphides, that will be detected by the powerful EM instruments.
“We are also surveying the surrounding area in collaboration with Council for Geosciences, to identify the district-scale structural controls on emplacement of the mafic intrusive bodies, that will assist all explorers working in the district, which we believe has potential to return to being a major copper-producing district,” Smart says.