Drill seekers
YESTERDAY'S market pyrotechnics served to obscure the significance of dual announcements by what is still Oxiana Limited but will soon be Oz Minerals. The company has sown the seeds of a strategic alliance with Indonesia's biggest miner, PT Antam, in a deal which, more immediately, will ease the path of the fledgling Martabe gold and silver project.
And, more importantly, the Ox seems to have confirmed a serious extension of its Prominent Hill copper-gold deposit in South Australia.
Drilling last year indicated that something big juts 900 metres from the western fringe of the Prominent Hill project, which will begin production by year's end and will be producing a minimum of 110,000 tonnes of copper and 75,000 ounces of gold by the end of 2009.
Subsequent drilling has underscored the potential of the western copper zone, with some serious grades returned at relatively comfortable depths.
Further work, obviously, needs to be done to establish a resource.
The potential of the western zone is generating serious excitement inside Ox-Oz. If the Western Zone is as good as it looks it reinforces the view that Prominent Hill is not alone out there, that there might well be a series of covered, copper-gold pods and that Oxiana's exploration team is developing an understanding of their geological signatures.
OXR
oxiana limited
