American West gets rods turning in Utah copper hunt

ASX-listed American West Metals has launched a maiden diamond drilling campaign at its West Desert zinc-copper-indium deposit in Utah, USA. The inaugural program is aimed at expanding the known historic mineralisation by drill testing the continuity of a suite of high-grade zinc and copper hot spots. The company says the results will be fed into a mineral resource estimate and used to assess the potential of an open pit mining operation.

According to American West, the deposit houses a historical and foreign resource in excess of 59 million tonnes, including a high-grade core of 16.5 million tonnes grading 6.3 per cent zinc, 0.3 per cent copper and 33 grams per tonne indium. Importantly, the company says the resource remains open at depth and along strike, leaving the door open to discover additional mineralisation to pad out the impending scoping study.

American West’s latest campaign will see the company plunge 10 diamond drill holes for approximately 7,500 metres into the project as it looks to test zones with open mineralisation and limited historical drilling. The company believes it could beef up its existing non-JORC resource, adding significant tonnage and grade to its growing armoury of transitional energy minerals.

Management is also looking further afield, with plans in place to secure a second drill rig to pepper a number of “exciting” nearby exploration targets defined in a recently completed geophysical survey that lit up a number of geophysical anomalies that require testing.

American West Metals Managing Director, Dave O’Neill said: “The drilling is planned to test the West Desert resource in areas that already have some impressive zinc, copper and silver intercepts, and to confirm our assumptions that the continuity of these zones will support a range of development scenarios.”

“The drilling will also be used to confirm the amenability of the shallow mineralisation to open-pit mining, further adding to the development optionality at West Desert.”

The West Desert Project area lies some 160 kilometres southwest of Salt Lake City, Utah. The project lays claim to around 330 acres of private land, over 300 mining claims and a single state metalliferous mineral lease that collectively account for a total land package of around 32 square kilometres.

The area, that sits in the fruitful Sevier Orogenic Belt, boasts a number of world-class copper deposits, including the over $40 billion-dollar market-capped Rio Tinto’s Kennecott mine, largely considered to have churned out more copper than any other mine in history.

Outside of its Utah landholdings, American West has interests in the high-grade Storm copper and Seal zinc projects located in Nunavut, Canada.

Storm is a sediment-hosted copper discovery with an entourage of thick high-grade copper intersections cutting across several zones. To date, the project area has received limited drilling beyond the known strike of copper mineralisation. A recently completed electromagnetic survey at the site provided a glimpse of the area’s immense prospectivity, outlining a flock of shallow magnetic conductors that are coincident with copper mineralisation unveiled through previous drilling.

American West says its proximal Seal project has an initial resource estimate of about 1 million tonnes going 10.24 per cent zinc, with 46.5 grams per tonne silver for 103,000 tonnes of zinc and 1.5 million ounces of silver. The company believes Seal offers significant opportunities for further discoveries.

With demand for copper and zinc expected to double by 2050, amid their increasing use in the electric vehicle industry and battery technology sectors, American West could find itself with a slew of new year activity as exploration across its now in vogue asset base advances. With a market hungry for all things lithium and clean energy solutions, the company’s timing looks impeccable.

Whilst the company’s current focus is on scrubbing up the historical non-JORC resource at West Desert to the point that it can prove up a mining operation, Storm is no slouch either. It is clearly begging for follow up after previously throwing up some crazy long high-grade intersections including 110m at 2.45 per cent copper right from surface and 56m going 3.07 per cent from just 12m down hole.

Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@businessnews.com.au