Collective Mining has officially announced the commencement of drilling operations at its San Antonio Project.
According to certain reports, the company plans to drill a minimum of 2,500 metres, while simultaneously testing three large gold-copper porphyry targets located within a well-defined 2.5-kilometer mineralized corridor.
The stated development comes on the back of Collective Mining’s bid to re-analyze historical data, and therefore, complete an extensive surface mapping, along with geochemical sampling program at San Antonio. This would go on to conceive the definition of a strongly altered and mineralized 2.5-kilometer corridor. Now, across the corridor, the company has focused more on three targets named Pound, Real and Euro, each one subsequently prepared for drill testing in the Phase 1 program.
Next up, ought to mention how diamond drilling has already begun at the Pound target where previous drilling in 2021 intercepted from surface 710 metres at 0.53 g/t gold equivalent (SAC-08), and 750 metres at 0.41 g/t gold equivalent (SAC-06) within a mix of brecciated porphyry quartz diorite and metagabbro country rock.
You see, both the holes would cut increasing grades of copper at depth and bottomed in mineralization. While recent mapping and sampling has encountered widespread mineralization and has also expanded the surface footprint of highly altered system to 650 metres x 550 metres, there is a belief that prior drilling may have discovered the pyrite halo of a copper-gold porphyry system with stronger mineralization potentially in close proximity.
“Shortly after going public, the Company announced a bonafide grassroots discovery at the San Antonio Project by drilling two very high-risk holes on the same section line at different dips into the Pound target with each hole cutting more than 700 meters of mineralization from surface. Immediately thereafter, our attention shifted to the Guayabales Project, leading to the discovery of Apollo system, which has remained our chief focus ever since. With a strong treasury and an expanded operating team in place today, we are coming full circle and revisiting San Antonio,” said Ari Sussman, Executive Chairman, Collective Mining.
Another detail worth a mention is rooted in the fact that new gold and copper soil anomalies have been outlined over surface areas exceeding 400 metres x 250 metres at the Real and Euro targets, respectively. These anomalies will now be tested with reconnaissance drilling in Q1, 2025.
Markedly enough, during the outlining process, Collective Mining discovered that the Real target is actually located 400 metres to the northwest of Pound. The company also found it to boast multiple gold and copper mineralized porphyry clasts hosted within breccia bodies.
Turning our attention towards the Euro target, it was found to be located one kilometer south of Pound. As for its properties, it showed traces of coherent and coincident soil anomalies for gold (> 0.3 ppm), copper (> 100 ppm) and molybdenum (> 20 ppm). Not just that, the area in question also had zones of porphyry quartz and sulphide veinlets associated with strong sericitic alteration.
This basically signals a discovery related to an upper and/or peripheral portion of a porphyry system.
“I have been convinced by our team that we have a legitimate chance of finding a major gold-copper porphyry system. The size of the alteration zone and abundance of high-grade mineralization on surface is impressive. With drilling underway, we look forward to receiving assay results and using the data to vector towards the mineralized fluid source of what is clearly an exceptionally large system,” said Ari Sussman.
