Mine of the Month: The Epic Tale of Sweden’s 1,000-year-old Falun Mine
FALUN’S BACK, BABY
In early 2022, Australian investors started hearing rumblings and rumours, with many hearing about the Falun Mine for the very first time on 01 May of that year.
ASX-listed Alicanto Minerals (ASX:AQI) dropped the bombshell news that it had acquired the 1,000-year-old site, with the goal of starting a major exploration program to extend and revive the historic mine.
It probably won’t surprise you to learn that a patch of ground that has already been mined for more than 1,000 years won’t cost very much – and Alicanto picked it up for less than it would have cost them to licence Ulvaeus and Andersson’s ABBA song “Money, Money, Money” to use in a commercial for the company. But probs more than “Copperhead Road”, so perhaps a fair balance was struck.
The total cost was just $200,000 to settle the deal, including $50,000 in cash and $150,000 through the issue of 3.6 million AQI shares.
At the time, AQI managing director Rob Sennitt said the buy was “an outstanding acquisition for the company” which would allow Alicanto to “consolidate the highly prospective tenure containing the world-class Falun mine into our plans for the exploration of the consolidated Falun Project”.
And if you’re wondering if the tiny price tag might have been an indication that a 1,000-year-old mine might already be empty, Sennitt explained why you’d probably be wrong.
Historically, Falun’s produced 28Mt at 4% copper, 4g/t gold, 5% zinc, 2% lead and 35g/t silver – while recent drilling had returned assays of up to 744 grams per tonne (g/t) silver, 32.4% zinc and 1.9% copper at the Skyttgruvan target, along the mineralised trend from the historical Falun mine.
Add to that these very simple facts: Until now, the mineralisation depth had been out of reach of the Viking miners of old, and it’s only recently (relative to the site’s 1,000 year history) that prices for the metals AQI is looking for have made digging deeper at the site economically feasible.
So there could be life in the old Swedish mine yet, more than 10 centuries after Olof Skötkonung – King Olaf of Sweden – first realised that the very future of Sweden lurked beneath a mountain
AQI Price at posting:
5.0¢ Sentiment: Buy Disclosure: Held
