Argentina sits in the same mineral-rich rocks as South American neighbour Chile, home to some truly monstrous gold and copper mines.
And yet Argentina’s international mining and exploration industry is still in its relative infancy.
Case in point: Between January and September 2020, Chile’s mining exports were worth $US26.7 billion.
For 2020 as a whole, Argentina’s mining exports – mostly lithium, gold and silver — will be worth about $US2.4 billion.
“Argentina is hellishly underexplored compared to Chile,” Challenger Exploration (ASX:CEL) managing director Kris Knauer told *.
“There’s a lot of interesting and highly prospective geology in Argentina. I think it could become a new go-to mining destination, like Ecuador over the last six years.”
Most Argentinean gold mines are held by US or Canadian listed companies, so apart from lithium, there hasn’t been much in terms of ASX exposure – until recently.
A tiny contingent of ASX listed gold juniors, headed by Challenger Exploration and E2 Metals, are enjoying outstanding success at their respective projects.
When Challenger kicked off a maiden drilling program on its high-grade Hualilan gold project in September last year it had a market cap of $19m.
Mostly dormant for the last 15 years, this project had a big historical drilling database and a non-JORC (unofficial) resource of 627,000oz grading 13.7g/t gold “which remained open in most directions”.
That maiden drilling program was a success. Highlight intercepts like 6.1m at 34.6g/t gold, 21.9g/t silver, 2.9 per cent zinc rerated the company into a ~$95m stock.
Challenger – which has just raised $20m for a monster drill program — is now worth about $140m.
“We now have five rigs running on site to get a resource out first quarter next year,” Knauer says.
“The challenge for us at the moment is that every second hole is a positive surprise and its become ‘geez, we really need to get these next five holes in the resource as well’.
“The initial target is to get more than 1 million ounces, but it will be the first of quite a few resource upgrades to come.”
The major miners are already watching, Knauer says.
“I know that there is a couple of majors tracking us,” he says.
“They requested meetings at the Precious Metals Summit. I was quite shocked they knew who we were, and what we were doing.”
