My mate who’s a Exploration Manager, he's overseen three...

My mate who’s a Exploration Manager, he's overseen three manganese projects, two that made it through to production and one that didn’t, he had a look at the ESR drill setup and gave me this take!



Had a good run over the ESR drill map and setup mate, and honestly, it looks pretty bloody smart for where they’re at.

First thing that jumps out is the linearity of those targets at Ira Miri. You don’t get that sort of structure unless the geology’s doing you a favour, probably a stratiform manganese seam or some fault-bounded enrichment. The way they’ve lined up their first drill fences, it’s clear they’re chasing continuity, not just poking random holes. Good sign.

They’re not mucking around with a token few hundred metres either, 10,000 metres of RC and 3,000 metres of diamond is a serious first-up commitment. You don’t plan that unless you’ve already seen enough at surface to believe you’ve got some decent tonnage sitting there.

Ira Miri is absolutely the right place to start too, those +50% manganese outcrops aren’t window dressing, but you’ve gotta remember, surface grades always look sexy. The real test will be seeing if those grades hold once you get 10, 20, 30 metres down. If they start pulling 5 to 10 metre zones grading 35% manganese plus consistently across fences, then they’re onto something pretty special.

Sica looks interesting too, especially that detrital manganese they’ve flagged. Detrital’s funny stuff, it can either be junk or gold depending how thick and clean it is. If they can show stacked layers of 40% manganese detrital, even shallow, you could mine that quicker and cheaper than hard rock.

The access looks good too, there’s roads nearby, it’s close to the coast, and there’s that port you mentioned last week. Logistics will never be perfect in a place like Timor, but it’s a hell of a lot better than hauling ore hundreds of kilometres like some other juniors have had to do.

Biggest unknown, continuity. Simple as that. It’s great to have high grades splashed about, but unless they stitch it together into a proper mineralised body, it’s just noise. That’s what the first 20 holes will tell us.

Honestly mate, if I was betting purely on how the groundwork’s been laid, the mapping, the sampling, the way they’ve structured the drilling, I’d say ESR’s doing about 90% of things right here. Still early days, but definitely a fair dinkum shot at shaping up a proper manganese story if the drill rods behave.