Barry FitzGerald: Sun shines for Solstice as copper leg adds to WA gold potential
'Garimpeiro' columnist Barry FitzGerald has covered the resources industry for 35 years. Now he's sharing the benefits of his experience with Stockhead readers.
Gold is where junior resource companies need to be. It's even better when they can add a copper leg to their story.
That's a position Solstice Minerals (ASX:SLS) has worked its way into with its pick-up earlier this year of the advanced Nanadie copper-gold project in WA's Murchison region.
The low-cost acquisition ($1m cash and some shares) came with an (inferred) mineral resource estimate of 162,000t of copper and 130,000oz of gold.
The pick-up has proved well-timed as the value of copper MREs held by juniors has come in to sharp focus recently as a result of takeover bids for Xanadu Mines (ASX:XAM) and New World Resources (ASX:NWC).
Both bids were at big premiums to the ruling market prices for the targets, prompting a rub-off affect on a whole bunch of other ASX juniors with copper resources in a kind of who's next response by investors.
Ownership of Nanadie does not make Solstice a takeover target. But as Solstice sets about growing the resource into something much bigger, it can expect heightened interest from investors.
Nanadie is essentially a copper free option in Solstice because the stock continues to trade around its pre-acquisition levels and where it was in September last year when Garimpeiro had a look at the company's Eastern Goldfields exploration hunt.
The Yarri gold project is exciting under cover stuff on a big ground position straddling the Keith-Kilkenny and Laverton tectonic zones, home to multi-million ounce operations owned by others to the north and south.
Edjudina discovery
Solstice has already unearthed a discovery in the making at the Edjudina Range prospect, and at two nearby prospects – Statesman Well and Bluetooth – which have the potential to yield open pit MREs in quick fashion.
Solstice has just reported that the first-ever reverse circulation drilling at Edjudina Range returned a 20m hit at 1.02g/t gold from 36m downhole. Early days but encouraging stuff for sure given the RC holes followed on from reconnaissance type holes that included 2m at 3.17g/t.
The company has also completed a RC drilling program at Statesman Well and Bluetooth with assay results expected in the next couple of weeks.
More work is planned and it has to be said that Solstice is well placed to keep up the gold momentum and get going with the drill bit at Nanadie in the back half of the year to grow its copper leg.
Cash backed
The momentum capability is due to Solstice being one of the best cash-backed explorers out there.
At the end of the March quarter it was holding $13.6m in cash, the equivalent of 13c a share.
As mentioned back in September last year, when the stock was trading at 18.5c, the strong cash-backing is a result of residual funds from the company's 2022 IPO and the sale last year of its 80% stake in the Hobbes gold deposit (177,000oz) for $10m to Northern Star Resources (ASX:NST).
Gold from Hobbes is destined to be run through Northern Star's nearby Carosue Dam gold operation.
Solstice's Yarri project is in the same neck of the world as Carosue Dam as well as AngloGold's Sunrise Dam mine and the Rebecca-Roe and Apollo Hill projects of Ramelius Resources (ASX:RMS) and Saturn Metals (ASX:STN) respectively.
Yarri's proximity to the gold processing infrastructure in the region could well lead to another Hobbes-type deal for Solstice depending on what it comes up with at Statesman Well and Bluetooth, or Edjudina Range for that matter.
Solstice managing director Nick Castleden explained the junior's modus operandi recently at the RRS Garther Round conference in Adelaide.
'Find something that is valuable, take it to a point where we have added as much value as we can, and then find someone else to mine it. That's our sweet spot.'
Castleden and other directors have done it five times before at other gold companies, with the value of the deals having ranged from small stuff up to more than $1 billion, most recently the Rebecca project held by Ramelius. Now with the Nanadie copper-gold project Solstice is in the process of finding its sweet spot.
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