Nickel/copper explorer Talon Metals has purchased new drill rights and hired more people to step up its exploration efforts for battery minerals in Minnesota.
The TSX-listed company bought three new Boart Longyear drill rigs, taking its in-house drilling fleet to six rights.
The new rigs will be focused on exploring outside the main resource area, where numerous intercepts of high-grade nickel/copper mineralisation have been discovered.
The first three zones that will be targeted are known as the 221 zone, the 264 zone, and the 164 zone. The company also plans to drill a highly conductive anomaly that sits directly below the main zone resource area.
“Talon’s in-house geology and geophysics teams have already established the initial high-grade zone of nickel/copper mineralisation at the Tamarack nickel project that will supply Tesla and potentially other customers. Our investment in these three new drill rigs and hiring the people to deploy them on a 24/7 basis will hopefully confirm our geologists’ view that Tamarack is a ‘district scale’ resource similar to other large-scale nickel sulphide districts in Canada and Russia that have been shown to have numerous zones of high-grade mineralisation,” said CEO Henri van Rooyen.
Chief exploration and operations officer Brian Goldner added that, based on last year’s metrics alone, Talon has increased its hit ratio from 50% to 95%, and drilled a record 33 000 m while intersecting a record amount of high-grade massive sulphides.
“With these new rigs, we plan to exceed the past milestones and hope to demonstrate that Minnesota has even more to contribute to the clean energy transition and serve as a domestic source of infinitely recyclable battery materials like nickel, copper, cobalt and iron.”