Explorer West Coast Silver (ASX:WCE), formerly Errawarra Resources, is peeling back the layers of understanding at its Elizabeth Hill Silver Project — and one analogous project “halfway around the world” has quickly proven key.
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While there are a few analogous projects West Coast Silver has been taking key lessons from, one has stood out more than any other — the Bou-Azzer project in Morocco.
This project, buried in the Anti-Atlas in the North African country, shares many of the same qualities as Elizabeth Hill, ranging from an abundance of cobalt, silver, and gold to the presence of ultramafic rocks and granite controlled by structural deformation that significantly post-dates the rocks’ modern formation.
Even better for West Coast Silver, who has studiously been taking notes, is the fact the Morocco project was discovered 100 years ago. Since then, there’s been over 60 deposits found and mined through 80 years’ constant work.
All that means plenty of history to learn from — which is exactly what West Coast is doing.
“There’s a really long-lived story in Morocco… they’ve had continuous success exploring and mining,” ERM Technical Consultant Tony Donaghy told HotCopper.
Mr Donaghy works for Environmental Resources Management, which was brought on by West Coast Silver to provide technical advice on the Elizabeth Hill Silver Project as it continues to develop towards production.
He and ERM were the team that first linked the long century of Bou-Azzer successes to Elizabeth Hill and gave West Coast Silver a strong leg up this year.
“Having Bou-Azzer as an analogue gives us a working hypothesis to hit the ground running and shows us what the critical factors are to focus our exploration activities on,” Mr Donaghy told HotCopper in a Watchlist interview.
“This working model [it gives us]… allows for critical re-evaluation of past exploration activities that have been done and gives us data assets that have been gathered, where past explorers may not have fully recognised the significance of what they were looking at because they weren’t using the models we’re using.
On top of all that, he added, “It gives us the idea to test the significance of those results, push ideas, and push regional exploration at Elizabeth Hill ahead.”
All this has led to “bonanza” early days at Elizabeth Hill as things fall into place.
Drilling got underway at the project last week following a long mobilisation period, as well as all the usual setup for any Australian-based mining company.
With June marking ‘go’ time, West Coast Silver is diving into the first hole as part of the 1,500-metre inaugural diamond drilling campaign. It’s targeting known high-grade silver mineralisation and investigating new structures.
“It’s well-known that [Elizabeth Hill] has been mined in the past, so what we’re working through at the present is how to target more of the silver mineralisation in the project itself… to enable drilling programs to be developed,” Mr Donaghy said.
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“Then, we’re also looking around regionally at similar environments to all formations and busily prioritising target areas in the regional data sets where we think there might be more Elizabeth Hill-style mineralisation.
“I think that it’s all actually quite exciting, as it stands,” ERM’s consultant concluded.
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