Flagship Minerals chairman and managing director Paul Lock said: “Stream sediments are a low-cost method of vectoring into exploration opportunities in the right conditions. The results confirm the large-scale nature of the copper anomalism across much of the Rosario copper project.”
The company is now gearing up for a trenching program at the Rosario East Trend as a precursor to an upcoming drilling campaign. Talks with drilling contractors are already in progress, with Flagship aiming to kick off a 2000m reverse circulation drilling program by mid to late March.
Positioned in Chile’s Central Copper Belt, the Rosario project is in a quality address, sitting between the renowned mining hubs of Copiapó and Antofagasta and just 10 kilometres north of Codelco’s massive El Salvador mine.
The decision to accelerate exploration work at Rosario, given the early promising results, has gone hand-in-hand with the company’s recent move to change its name from Pan Asia to Flagship Minerals.
As Lock will happily explain, the company’s name change is a subtle hint of things to come after the junior explorer took the opportunity of a new year to reset its focus on copper at Rosario.
“We want to make it extremely clear to our shareholders and future investors the company wants to be known for its flagship project,” says Lock. The name-change also underlines management’s renewed effort to find a single, company-making project that could produce sufficient cashflow to self-fund the exploration of other projects.
Lock is firm in his stance that the company will stay true to its core identity as an exploration firm dedicated to securing and developing critical resources in strategic settings.
He emphasises access to essential infrastructure – such as roads, power and water – with a clear regulatory pathway to production is fundamental to a mining project’s success. He argues that without these key elements, most ventures are doomed before they begin.
Hinting at those thoughts and the prospectivity of its Chilean project, Flagship got ahead of the curve and recently tripled the size of its landholding at Rosario.
The move wasn’t about growing the resource. Instead, Flagship wanted to secure an access corridor to the grid, as well as a supply of groundwater and flat ground suitable for a solar array.
When Flagship first landed Rosario, it became immediately clear to the company that, apart from ticking all those boxes and sitting in one of the best regions in the world for mega copper mines, the project also has enormous potential for a low development cost copper discovery.
Consisting of mainly fractured and brecciated rocks, Rosario’s Manto-style mineralisation is a common feature of many of the copper deposits in Chile.
It is a style distinct from some of the bigger mines surrounding Rosario, which have been developed from huge porphyry systems. Although extremely valuable as assets, porphyry deposits tend to absorb enormous amounts of development capital prior to first production.
Flagship’s project appears to have a deep high-grade oxide zone, which if the grade stacks up, could open up the opportunity to develop a simple and cheap heap leaching mining operation or an electrowinning circuit to produce cathodes.
Alternatively, the company may just as easily produce a concentrate that could be rolled 100 kilometres down a hill by truck before being toll treated at neighbour ENAMI’s El Salado copper ore processing plant.
Regardless of whether Pan Asia looks at a heap leach or a third-party processing route to market, the company’s planning appears to be focused on a phased exploration approach that would confirm a commitment to low-cost production.
Having low capital expenditure options as a pathway to early cashflow immediately reduces the risk of share dilution and retains a larger proportion of the project in the hands of existing shareholders.
Adding to the appeal of the project, the company recently announced a four-year $35-million funding package with New York-based private equity firm Global Emerging Markets, suggesting others may share a similar view on Rosario.
Pan Asia thought the new funding facility was potentially sufficient to pay for resource and prefeasibility studies at Rosario.
With its new company name appearing to give a nod to the prospectivity of its Chilean copper project and plenty of exploration news likely to flow from site in the next 12 months, Flagship has given itself a clear road to focus on what it believes will be a game-changing flagship opportunity for the company.
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