Norwest has started drill planning for its Bali project in Western Australia where high-grade copper has been noted in recent surface samples and historical drilling.
The project hosts the 8km Bali shear zone, where visible copper associated with gossans have been observed.
Despite historical drilling – most of which have been less than 30m – returning results up to 6m at 7.17 per cent copper from a depth of 17m, no drilling has been carried out on the project since 1989, while the Bali East prospect has never been tested.
Rock chip sampling carried out by Norwest Minerals (ASX:NWM) in 2018 returned an average grade of 6.3 per cent with a top result of 36.8 per cent.
“While RC and diamond drill rigs are being mobilised to continue drilling the high-grade gold shoot at our Bulgera gold Pproject, Norwest has commenced planning drillholes to test for economic copper mineralisation at our wholly owned Bali copper project,” chief executive officer Charles Schaus said.
“The high-grade copper in recent surface samples and historical drillholes makes the 8-kilometre Bali shear zone an excellent WA copper exploration target which we intend to aggressively explore with first drilling expected to commence in Q3 CY2021.”
Bali copper project
The 41km2 Bali project is located about 75km west of Paraburdoo and 250km west of Newman.
Small-scale mining was carried out in the area in the 1950s and 1960s while Barrick carried out some light drill testing in 1989, though most holes were less than 30m and the potential for the shear zone to host copper and/or other base metals at depth was not tested.
Five prospects have been identified in the project.
Of these, Bali Lo and Bali High were drill tested for copper, lead, zinc and silver mineralisation.
Meanwhile, historical channel sampling at Bali East prospect returned encouraging results, with assays of up to 20.6 per cent copper while sampling at Bali South returned promising assays that ranged from 0.98 per cent to 11.3 per cent copper.
Norwest added that an airborne electromagnetic and magnetic survey flown across the project failed to show discrete EM anomalies that present as walk-up drill targets.
However, this is not considered to be surprising given the highly weathered profile and oxidised sulphides.
This article was developed in collaboration with Norwest Minerals, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing.
This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.
