Massive South American Porphyry, page-13

Nice write up on Peru and Inca in resource Rising Stars this morning.

https://www.resourcesrisingstars.com.au/news-article/chatter-aplenty-over-potential-fmg-copper-gold-monster-find

Inca Minerals:

The amped up response in Tasman’s share price to the news on Vulcan – it will take good assay results to move the dial for the $70 billion Fortescue – was as clear an example as there is as to how there is always an appetite for potential game-changing exploration results from juniors, no matter what the broader market is doing.

The problem from a broader perspective is that much of the recent exploration effort, and the flood of IPOs, has been about kicking rocks around old gold mines, something not so interesting now because of the back pedalling in the gold price.

The bigger picture stuff where potential Tier 1 targets like that sought at Vulcan by the Fortescue/Tasman joint venture has suffered as a result. But there are juniors out there focussed on finding a Tier 1 deposit rather than the next small gold mine.

Inca Minerals (ICG, trading at 9.5c for a market cap of $35m), is an example. Its flagship Riqueza project in Peru is a large scale epithermal/porphyry/skarn complex in a part of the country which has also attracted Tier 1 hunters BHP and Anglo American.

It is drill-ready thanks, in a big way, to South 32 (S32). Over three years under an option agreement and then earn-in phase, South32 spent $3.8m on all the things needed to be done to define drill targets, only to walk away from the joint venture in May last year when things got a bit hard exploring in South America because of COVID-19.

It is what big companies like South32 do. The good news in all that for Inca is that Riqueza reverted to 100% Inca ownership, with South32 having funded the work required to identify 28 high quality copper/gold/silver targets.

Inca is preparing to drill the first of the targets in coming months, and while South32 has retreated back to Perth, you can bet that any number of major miners, along with Inca shareholders, will be watching what the drilling comes up with.

It is high-risk/high-reward stuff that would have been interesting enough to watch for the $13.7b-market cap South32, let alone the $35m Inca.

Having said that, the company has also lined up a second leg to its “Tier1” hunt by taking up a big ground position in the new and emerging East Tennant Creek IOCG/SEDEX hunting ground in the Northern Territory.

Its flagship there is the Frewena East project, immediately adjacent to the recent Crosswinds copper carbonate discovery by Middle Island (MDI) in part of what it calls its Barkly copper-gold Super project.

Initial soil sampling by Inca has identified a 5km diameter target it has called Roadhouse, with Crosswinds 800m to the west and thought to be on Roadhouse’s western margin. Early-stage stuff but interesting nevertheless in what is a frontier area.

This was published before the NDI data came out yesterday...I think the new flagship could be Frewena Far East