Solstice shoots the lights out for copper-hungry investors

In a market that can’t get enough of decent copper exploration hits against a backdrop of record prices for the red metal, Solstice Minerals (ASX:SLS) has been shooting the lights out.

During the week, Solstice released another batch of super impressive drill results from its Nanadie copper-gold project, northwest of Sandstone in WA.

It’s the project Solstice acquired in March last year for $1 million in cash and some shares.

Nanadie came with a Mineral Resource Estimate of 40.4Mt grading 0.4% copper and 0.1g/t gold (162,000t of copper and 130,000oz of gold) from work undertaken at the property by the likes of BHP dating back to 1996/97.

The fact that this 40.4Mt MRE has now become irrelevant is reflected in the growth in Solstice’s market cap from $45 million at the time of Nanadie’s acquisition to $468 million this week.

This week’s results from the ongoing drilling program at the project were headlined by a combined RC/diamond tail that returned 169.3m grading 0.87% copper and 0.29g/t gold.

The intercept included 73.3m at 1.07% copper and 0.26g/t gold from 299m which, in turn, included 8m at 2.12% copper and 0.45g/t gold from 309m.

That’s the sort of hits BHP would be happy with in its search for the next big copper project in the Andes at elevations of more than 4000m.

But Nanadie is in flat and featureless country.

Solstice’s technically-minded boss, Nick Castleden, said Nanadie had continued to surprise on the upside.

He said the latest results continue to “build genuine volume and grade” around the previously reported “stellar” drillholes.

In addition, drilling is starting to delineate a shallow and high-grade position north of the cross-fault – a potential gamechanger for future pit optimisations, Castleden said.

It was then over to the broker analysts to give some broader context to the drill results and Nanadie’s obvious upside from the current Mineral Resource.

Paul Howard at Canaccord had a crack.

“In our view, the latest results further increase confidence that Nanadie can deliver both meaningful tonnage and grade growth relative to the current 40.4Mt resource base,” he said.

“We recently visited the site and following that, increased our Nanadie target size to 200Mt (previously 140Mt) and updated our price target.”

Solstice was caught in the same downdraft that took the mining sector down during the week, notwithstanding the continuing flow of stellar drill results from Nanadie.

It was interesting then to see Canaccord’s Speculative Buy rating on Solstice with a price target of $4.15 a share, based on a median EV/Resource multiple from a set of ASX-listed explorer, developer and small producer peers, and the project’s strategic location on a mining lease in Tier 1 WA.

Mamba Exploration (ASX:M24)

Nanadie has switched the market onto the copper potential of the broader region. Is there a Nanadie 2.0 out there?

It’s why a little thing called Mamba Exploration (ASX:M24) has been attracting investor attention… including, it seems, from Tim Goyder of Liontown and Chalice discovery fame.

The word in the West is that Goyder has been buying Mamba stock in the last couple of weeks and could be sitting at just under 5%.

He could well go higher if he takes a lick of the $6-$7 million capital raise Mamba is now finalising.

Ahead of going into a trading halt pending completion of the capital raise, Mamba shares had doubled from 2c to 4.5c in the last couple of weeks.

The march higher – and presumably Goyder’s interest – follows on from Mamba’s September 21 announcement that multiple thick and high-grade historical copper zones had been pulled from the database of its recently acquired Meeka East project.

Historical results reported by Mamba included 26m at 1% copper from 24m, including 8m at 1.7% copper at the Copper Hills prospect, and 13.4m at 1.3% copper from 151.7m, including 5.21m at 2.7% copper, at the Lady Alma prospect.

A new exploration model reinterprets the copper host as a felsic volcanic unit traceable for 3.5km across Mamba’s tenements, where gold has long been a focus.

Mamba noted that the district hosts numerous copper occurrences within the same volcanic sequences, including Solstice’s Nanadie copper-gold project 30km to the south-east and separated from Copper Hills by a series of granite intrusions.

Parbo Resources (ASX:PRB)

The seasoned crew of explorationists that brought Parbo Resources (ASX:PRB) to the market in a $5 million IPO on September 22 named the company as a nod of respect to the late Sir Arvi Parbo.

Sir Arvi was the Estonian immigrant who joined Western Mining Corporation as a graduate mining engineer in 1956 and went on to become managing director and later chairman over a 43-year career.

It’s kind of surprising that no one had thought of aligning their company/project/prospect with the great man who insisted people just call him Arvi.

He was probably the last MD/chairman of a leading mining company (WMC was acquired by BHP in 2005) that was happy to take calls from the media at home – or share a red wine in the main bar at Kalgoorlie’s Palace Hotel with all comers.

It’s kind of neat then that Parbo has got off to a flying start as a listed company. The 20c shares in the IPO were trading at 27c in Thursday’s market to give the company a $22.5 million market cap.

And given the interest in Solstice and Mamba mentioned above, it’s also kind of neat that Parbo’s copper-gold and gold projects are also found in the Meekatharra/Murchison region.

Just two weeks after listing, Parbo has completed a maiden drilling program at the Brians Mill gold prospect within its Bryah Basin copper-gold project, about 70km north-east of Meekatharra.

Assays are pending, but the company did say there were encouraging early signs from the identification in the drill chips of alteration consistent with its geological model.

Elsewhere in the Bryah, it will be chasing the potential to find a DeGrussa/Monty 2.0 VMS copper-gold deposit.

The company’s other project is the Mount Padbury gold project. It’s also a large district play with an interesting twist of searching for extensions of a gold mineralised greenstone beneath a cover of basalt. Think of it as a Plutonic deposit (Catalyst) 2.0 play.