American West Metals has unveiled a suite of new targets at its Copper Warrior project after completing an induced polarisation survey at the site in Utah, USA. The company says one of the anomalies tips the scales at 850m x 570m and returned grades as high as 3.3 per cent copper in geochemical sampling.
Notably American West says it has its foot on an even larger IP anomaly at the site which boasts a strike length of over 3.5km and is near to the zone's historic Big Indian and Blue Jay copper mines - a position management says could mean mineralised extensions from the legacy plays run through the target.
The latest survey was designed to test the response of several known mineralised units at the Big Indian mine that creep onto American West’s neighbouring tenure and also underline additional copper-hosted geological features.
The company describes the project’s ground position as “Tier 1 copper country” and pointed to the operation being just 15km from Utah's second-largest copper mine, Lisbon Valley as evidence of its prospectivity.
Late last year Lisbon Valley Mining tabled a 91.7 million tonne resource grading 0.28 per cent for 517.9 million pounds of contained copper at its namesake project.
American West now plans to test the anomalies, along with a handful of additional stratigraphic targets at Copper Warrior with a maiden drilling program at the site.
The process of jumping through the various bureaucratic hoops is now underway and the company is hopeful it could have access to the site as early as next month ahead of a 15-20-hole RC program for approximately 3000m.
Copper Warrior is positioned in south-east Utah’s Paradox Basin, a zone renowned for its copper, uranium, vanadium and potash mineralisation. The operation takes in a landholding of roughly five square kilometres made up of 61 unpatented lode mining claims.
The company is looking to generate targets at the site whilst it completes high-priority probes at its West Desert zinc-copper-indium deposit in Utah and Storm copper project in Canada.
Recent drilling across a prospective zone coined “2750N” within Storm returned a host of shallow, high-grade hits including 2m running almost 16 per cent copper from 70m inside a larger 19m envelope at 2.08 per cent copper from 58m.
The work at the project is part of an ambitious plan to establish a high-grade, shallow resource at Storm that could support a low-footprint direct-shipping ore, or “DSO” operation.
Material flagged as DSO can be sent directly to customers after minimal and economical treatment programs which commonly include crushing, screening, sorting and ore blending.
Meanwhile, work at West Desert has been focussed on metallurgical test work of the site’s copper with recent programs returning excellent recoveries of 94.4 per cent zinc and 78 per cent copper
Notably, West Desert houses a historical resource of over 59 million tonnes with a higher-grade, 16.5 million tonne core going 6.3 per cent zinc, 0.3 per cent copper and 33 grams per tonne indium.
With demand for copper and zinc both tipped to double by 2050 amidst ongoing use in the electric vehicle industry American West could find itself with a pipeline of 2023 activity as work across its now in-vogue portfolio gathers steam.
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By Matt Birney
