WCE hits extensions to previously producing silver mine in WA

Our silver Investment West Coast Silver (ASX: WCE) just released drill results from its project in the WA Pilbara.

WCE’s project previously produced 1.2M ounces of silver at ~2,194g/t from just 16,830 tonnes of ore in the early 2000’s.

Then mining stopped in 2000 because the silver price had collapsed to ~US$5/oz.

We are Invested in WCE to see it take advantage of current silver prices and put together a restart plan for the project.

In April this year WCE put together a maiden 2.8Moz resource at 617g/t silver.

And today WCE hit extensions to that resource, including:

(source)

Lower grades then we would have hoped (given the very high grades across the rest of the project).

BUT the silver mineralisation starts from surface and sits within, west and north of the current resource.

So the new zone appears to sit largely inside the open-pit design WCE’s been working with:

(We aren't mining engineers though, so we would need to wait for the upcoming studies for confirmation on this).

(source)

Here is what WCE said about our theory:

One thing we did notice from WCE’s results was the deeper hole chasing that high grade pod at depth came in slightly below our expectations.

(That’s below grade zone where WCE of 3m @ 524g/t silver - which we covered here)

Today's deeper hole passed ~8m east of a historic high grade intercept and returned only minor silver.

(source)

The zone could be narrow, so the hole may have simply missed it, WCE mentioned the result “bracketed” the zone's northern edge, so it still stays open to the east and south.

More drilling is planned in H2 2026 to chase this up.

Assays, resource update and Scoping Study all ahead

WCE also gave a tidy summary of its forward plan in today's announcement as it moves from explorer to developer and hopefully beyond in a nearer term opportunity::

(source)

Final assays from the last three diamond holes are due by the end of August.

Everything then rolls into an updated resource in Q4 and the Elizabeth Hill Scoping Study to commence then also.

We did mention in our initiation note that we were interested to see WCE exploring broader looking to find a repeat Elizabeth Hill.

So we have also been tracking the progress in the targeting which WCE included this today (which aligns with the Next steps above to see added exploration programs):

(source)

What’s next for WCE?

Here is WCE’s latest Gantt chart with everything we can expect to see over the coming months:

(source - WCE’s latest investor presentation)

In terms of exploration the three things we are looking out for are:

1. The RC drill campaign on the targets to the north of the Elizabeth Hill Mine (happening now).
2. The diamond drilling is going for at depth extensions to the Elizabeth Hill mine (started Mid April).
3. Geophysics across the broader project area

And then all of that data rolling into what we expect to be an updated JORC resource being fed into a Scoping Study, expected to get underway in Q4.

Here are the milestones we are tracking right now:

• 🔄 Drilling results (final 3 DD holes still due - source)
• 🔲 Updated mineral resource estimate
• 🔲 Scoping study starts
• 🔲 Scoping study results