Ann: Copper intersected in Stuart Shelf JV drilling, page-43

From memory, there have been a couple of tries at this type of deposit in aus. Cattlegrid in South Australia for example, among a few other small deposits, and I believe there is a youtube video going into depth of the exploration of that deposit. Nifty/Maroochydoore in WA also shares similarities, making a ton of money for one company but has been pretty disappointing since. As another poster pointed out, emmie bluff for coda is promising but, again, pretty deep.

One of the most fascinating stories in mining, for my mind, was the development of the formation model for porphyry intrusive copper deposits. On the back of a small number of geoscientists, with some quirky interpretations, a host of world beating discoveries were made, previously ignored or unknown, largely driving the exploration success in copper in the 80s/90s.

This well developed insight into the geological model of porphyry deposits is contrasted by the lack of such for sedimentary copper. We have so many questions that we are probing the edges of. What role of hydrogen as a reducing agent in the host rock? What is the impact of having copper source fluids interact with a gaseous sandstone reservoir vs a bituminous shale? What type and concentration of salt influences depositation to what degree.

The differences are such that we cannot yet agree on a conventional name for such systems with some proponents pushing for a complete ditching of previous 'redbed sediment hosted' terminology, even a basic disagreement of whether sedimentary hosted and stratiform deposits are of the same ilk or are more akin to geological 'cousins'.

All this is to say, the exploration space for sedimentary/stratiform copper is relatively poorly understood, with a 20 year relative gap in funding for research only now being addressed. A bit tangential from this thread, but a few posters requested some broader context.