Post by likeike on Mar 12, 2024 17:43:06 GMT
There’s always been climate change. But going back to copper, and the energy metals theme. I like Eloro for its scale potential, absolutely, that’s a good one. But that’s more polymetallic, where you have silver, lead, zinc, tin, copper, you have a broad suite of metals at Iska Iska. A new discovery was made in Idaho last year, October 2023, at the Hercules project in southwestern Idaho. It caught the attention of major mining firms, and Barrick Gold (NYSE:GOLD, TSX:ABX) jumped on this one and invested $30 million in a junior called Hercules Silver (TSX-V:BIG, OTC:BADEF). This project, Hercules, had formerly been a silver primary project with sniffs of copper in soils. But it turns out the silver, the near surface silver, was an extension of the deeper porphyry system.
Before 2022, nobody had figured that out what Hercules was able to uncover with a 3D IP survey that was able to see deeper down and see this chargeability anomaly. In 2022, Hercules did an IP survey over a smaller portion of the property and that’s what they used to guide their deeper drilling that led to the discovery hole in 2023.
A property-wide 3D IP survey was completed to depths of nearly 1,000 meters in 2023, and as it turns out it’s a much more expansive system than was previously understood. Hercules is going to be hunting for the early mineral porphyry core in 2024 drilling. So they’re going to get started drilling in a couple of months there in Idaho with three or four diamond drill rigs, and they’re going to be drilling some pretty deep holes targeting this porphyry system.
And actually, if you pull up the company news from February, they published some silver intercepts from the end of their 2023 program, and there are some really high grade silver intercepts there (HER-23-17: 11.3 Meters of 1,660 g/t silver, 0.7% lead, 1.75% zinc). So you have this multi-kilo silver in certain parts of the system at shallower depths, between surface and about 200 meters depth.
Deeper down they have this bornite enriched portion where the copper grades go up to as high as 2%. In the discovery hole 23-05, they intercepted 45 meters grading 1.94% copper, 111ppm molybdenum, and 8.2 g/t silver. That was what got everybody excited last year, 2% copper grades in a porphyry system are pretty special, and especially in Idaho!
As a longtime reader of 32gold, I remember you talking about Bayhorse Silver (TSX-V:BHS, OTC:BHSIF) a while ago. And what’s interesting about Bayhorse is they’re across the border, the state border. There’s a state border there between Idaho and Oregon, separated by the Snake River. Bayhorse has what could be a portion of the extension of this new porphyry trend. Maybe this is the beginning of a whole new copper porphyry belt in the US. Previously we thought that all the copper porphyries had been found by now in the US, obviously in Utah, in Arizona.
But this could be a new belt, and there is a land rush underway. Bayhorse even added come claims on the Idaho side of the Snake River in December, and recently announced some encouraging geophysical survey results.
This is a really exciting time, and I think this new American copper belt story is an important one to follow this year.
Bob Moriarty:
Let me point something out. I’m looking at a chart of Hercules, and Hercules went from $.25 to $1.62 in a few months. Now it has dropped back down, but that happens every year.
BIG.V (Daily)
And the strange thing is, I own a lot of Bayhorse here, and I was going to mention there’s a fair chance, I’m not going to say a good chance there. It’s a fair chance that Bayhorse has the same kind of potential as Hercules.
Goldfinger:
Hercules is definitely the first mover at the center of the action, but this is going to be something that takes several years to play out. A lot of exploration work has to be done to really get a better understanding of this system, including the age dating of the rocks and correlation the geochemistry with the geophysics. Barrick is helping Hercules with some of this age dating, and modeling. It’ll be interesting to see if that’s similar age to some of the other porphyries in that trend that goes up to BC. As a 15% shareholder of Hercules, Barrick is very much aligned with Hercules and they have seconded several of their top porphyry geos to Hercules for this drilling season.
Before 2022, nobody had figured that out what Hercules was able to uncover with a 3D IP survey that was able to see deeper down and see this chargeability anomaly. In 2022, Hercules did an IP survey over a smaller portion of the property and that’s what they used to guide their deeper drilling that led to the discovery hole in 2023.
A property-wide 3D IP survey was completed to depths of nearly 1,000 meters in 2023, and as it turns out it’s a much more expansive system than was previously understood. Hercules is going to be hunting for the early mineral porphyry core in 2024 drilling. So they’re going to get started drilling in a couple of months there in Idaho with three or four diamond drill rigs, and they’re going to be drilling some pretty deep holes targeting this porphyry system.
And actually, if you pull up the company news from February, they published some silver intercepts from the end of their 2023 program, and there are some really high grade silver intercepts there (HER-23-17: 11.3 Meters of 1,660 g/t silver, 0.7% lead, 1.75% zinc). So you have this multi-kilo silver in certain parts of the system at shallower depths, between surface and about 200 meters depth.
Deeper down they have this bornite enriched portion where the copper grades go up to as high as 2%. In the discovery hole 23-05, they intercepted 45 meters grading 1.94% copper, 111ppm molybdenum, and 8.2 g/t silver. That was what got everybody excited last year, 2% copper grades in a porphyry system are pretty special, and especially in Idaho!
As a longtime reader of 32gold, I remember you talking about Bayhorse Silver (TSX-V:BHS, OTC:BHSIF) a while ago. And what’s interesting about Bayhorse is they’re across the border, the state border. There’s a state border there between Idaho and Oregon, separated by the Snake River. Bayhorse has what could be a portion of the extension of this new porphyry trend. Maybe this is the beginning of a whole new copper porphyry belt in the US. Previously we thought that all the copper porphyries had been found by now in the US, obviously in Utah, in Arizona.
But this could be a new belt, and there is a land rush underway. Bayhorse even added come claims on the Idaho side of the Snake River in December, and recently announced some encouraging geophysical survey results.
This is a really exciting time, and I think this new American copper belt story is an important one to follow this year.
Bob Moriarty:
Let me point something out. I’m looking at a chart of Hercules, and Hercules went from $.25 to $1.62 in a few months. Now it has dropped back down, but that happens every year.
BIG.V (Daily)
And the strange thing is, I own a lot of Bayhorse here, and I was going to mention there’s a fair chance, I’m not going to say a good chance there. It’s a fair chance that Bayhorse has the same kind of potential as Hercules.
Goldfinger:
Hercules is definitely the first mover at the center of the action, but this is going to be something that takes several years to play out. A lot of exploration work has to be done to really get a better understanding of this system, including the age dating of the rocks and correlation the geochemistry with the geophysics. Barrick is helping Hercules with some of this age dating, and modeling. It’ll be interesting to see if that’s similar age to some of the other porphyries in that trend that goes up to BC. As a 15% shareholder of Hercules, Barrick is very much aligned with Hercules and they have seconded several of their top porphyry geos to Hercules for this drilling season.
