WCE to start drilling next week at its WA silver project
Our silver Investment West Coast Silver (ASX: WCE) is set to get drilling underway again at its WA silver project, with the drill rig to mobilise next week.
WCE's project hosts the historic Elizabeth Hill mine, which produced 1.2M ounces of silver at ~2,194g/t before shutting in 2000 when silver was ~US$5/oz.
WCE already has a maiden JORC resource estimate of 2.8M ounces of silver at 617g/t, making it the highest grade silver project on the ASX.
The new drill campaign announced today includes 18 diamond holes covering four objectives:
(source)
The first is drilling to increase confidence in the geological model, allowing more mineralisation to be brought into a study mine plan.
There are also holes targeting under the current resource to test for continuity at depth.
More defined silver ounces gives the pending Scoping Study more options to work with and gives more flexibility during the early years of mining to target specific areas to maximise early cashflow.
Here is an overview of the drilling planned:
(source)
Below are some cross sections showing the current resource and planned holes, the left showing the resource definition holes and the right showing the depth extension drilling:
(source)
Western extensions are also being targeted, aiming to add silver ounces to the resource. Up until now there has been minimal drilling from out here:
(source)
The final part of the upcoming drill campaign could generate significant new investor interest if drilling goes well - that is the Elizabeth Hill Deeps drilling.
From recent drilling, WCE had a hit of 3m at 524g/t silver which hinted at a new zone here, so WCE is back to follow up and define it. Here is how it looked from the hit back in July:
(source)
The plan here is a couple of holes to follow up and provide more drilling data to see if there is any more to this high grade hit:
(source)
You can see our coverage when that high grade “worm” was released back in July: WCE finds new 50m high grade silver zone below historic high grade Elizabeth Mine
All of this drilling is being done with the pending Scoping Study in mind, and there are two resource updates coming.
One in November from the recent drilling, and one in March next year (including the results from this program).
The Scoping Study remains on schedule for Q1 next year, and with grades well above most open pit mines, we are looking forward to seeing the economics at play here.
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)
So summing up, in terms of exploration the three things we are looking out for are:
- Future drilling to upgrade the resource, including Inferred resources to Indicated
- Drilling looking for extensions including the deeper high grade 3m at 524g/t silver hit.
- Testing of new targets plus 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:
