Nice article by Barry Fitzgerald MARONAN METALS (MMA): Not many...

Nice article by Barry Fitzgerald

MARONAN METALS (MMA):
Not many ASX juniors start out life with a major resource under their belt along with two potential Tier 1 opportunities worth pursuing in the same deposit.
That’s just what the recently listed Maronan Metals (MMA) has on offer at its namesake deposit in north-west Queensland’s base metals/gold rich Carpentaria province (Mt Isa, Cannington, Ernest Henry, Osborne, Eloise, and Century, to name the big ones).
MMA was spun-out of Red Metal (RDM) to give the Maronan the deposit a sharper investor focus, leaving Red to continue to explore to its own account, including a joint venture with OZ Minerals up Winu/Havieron way in the Patterson region of WA which will be worth watching in the back half of the year when some juicy targets are likely to be tested with the drill bit.
The over-subscribed $15 million IPO of MMA (Red retains a 50% interest) has gone down well, with the 20c shares now trading at 32c for an undiluted market cap of $48m.
The deposit lies 60km southeast of Cloncurry and was discovered by Shell’s long gone minerals arm in the 1980s. Over time it was investigated further by the likes of Phelps Dodge and BHP, among others, with Red arriving on the scene around 2004.
Based on all the work by heavyweights, including a Red joint venture with BHP between 2005-2010, Red reported a maiden inferred resource estimate for the deposit in 2015 which reflects the presence of two separate mineralisation types (bedded lead-silver partially overprinted by structurally controlled copper-gold mineralisation).
For a company with MMA’s market cap, the twin resources (30.8Mt at 6.5% lead and 106g/t silver and 11Mt at 1.6% copper and 0.8g/t gold), mainly from 200m to 1200m and open at depth, is impressive stuff.
It equates to 2Mt of lead, 100m ounces of silver, 170,000t of copper and 300,000 ounces of gold. The soft rock, the deposit’s geometry, and the region’s infrastructure of power, roads, and rail makes the deposit a likely development candidate as it stands, particularly once current metal prices are plugged in.
But MMA is out to prove up a potentially much bigger story at the deposit across two Tier 1 possibilities – the potential for the dominantly iron sulphide mineralisation to transition to richer copper sulphides at depth, and the potential to find the vent source of the bedded lead-zinc-silver mineralisation at depth.
Initially though, there could be an early prize to be had from drilling shallower copper-gold and lead-silver positions. MMA will do that first before moving on to the deeper search for big tonnage/higher grade potential at depth.