2 days ago
Paterson Province remains underexplored despite its gold and copper riches
Paterson Province is a highly prospective region with big endowments of gold and copper
Antipa Minerals has defined a significant resource at its Minyari Dome project and plans a standalone development
Greatland Gold is looking to provide toll treatment services at its Telfer processing plant
The Paterson Province covers around 30,000km2 to the east of the Hamersley Basin and southwest of the Canning Basin is one of the great mineral provinces in Australia, hosting some truly significant tier one projects such as Telfer and Nifty.
Telfer in particular has been a real drawcard with a stupendous pre-mining inventory of 32Moz of gold, a million tonnes of copper and about 25Moz of silver.
However, the region's quirks – including a relatively thick layer of cover in many parts – meant that other than Telfer and Nifty, which were discovered between 1972 and 1985 due to outcropping mineralisation, it remained largely neglected since the mid 1980s.
Antipa Minerals (ASX:AZY) managing director Roger Mason told Stockhead the company started pegging ground in the region after realising that geophysical and geochemical surface exploration techniques had come a long way since the mid-80s.
'For example, electrical, geophysical survey techniques that they were using in the mid 80s would have been 1970s technology,' he noted.
'So there was an opportunity in the region to apply state of the art geophysical and surface geochemical techniques to see through the cover to discover new ore bodies. And basically that's what happened.'
This is clearly highlighted by the discovery of 20Moz of gold, nearly 4Mt of copper and about 60Moz of silver in the last eight years or so under cover as shallow as 10m and up to 430m at the major Havieron project.
Mason believes this trend will continue as the Paterson is a very immature province from an exploration perspective, saying that material re-invigoration of exploration has only occurred in the last decade or so.
'The giant deposits will continue to be discovered and then a number of smaller multi-million ounce, but tier two and tier three discoveries will be made over the next several decades,' he added.
First mover advantage
Antipa itself has benefitted from being one of the first companies to seize on opportunities in the Paterson Province while it was still relatively unloved.
Mason said this allowed the company to put together ground in the shallowly covered part of the province.
This is important as there are significant parts that are under very deep cover that makes it challenging to explore and develop mines.
Its landholding of 4100km2 has proven rich enough for its work to culminate in a recently updated resource of 2.5Moz of gold equivalent – including 84,000t copper, 666,000oz silver and 13,000t cobalt – at its flagship Minyari Dome project.
'It's a significant resource. We had a scoping study out on the previous resource last October which showed very positive economics for a plus 10-year project mining one and a half million ounces of gold and producing 130,000ozpa for the first 10 years of project life,' Mason said.
'The economics were very strong for that project despite using a gold price of A$3000/oz for that study as the base case and it had an NPV at a 7% discount of over $830m pre-tax.
'It was a very positive outcome and so the Antipa board is moving forward with a pre-feasibility study.'
The resource is also significant enough that the company is planning a standalone development for Minyari Dome.
While the company will have to work through the usual permitting process in terms of environmental and Native Title considerations and stakeholders, it doesn't other have any particular hurdles towards going standalone in the region.
Minyari Dome benefits from roads in the area, a gas pipeline running adjacent to the west and a BP-led joint venture building a significant green energy plant near Winu.
Mason adds the company is pushing ahead with a very aggressive and multi-pronged strategy which is to complete the PFS and de-risk the Minyari standalone development opportunity.
'Currently, we've got four rigs in the area. We're drilling to expand the existing mineral resource, which will potentially expand the development life,' he said.
'We have an aggressive discovery-focused program in play as well, testing a range of priority gold targets.
'We've got three strings to the strategy bow, all of which are being sort of simultaneously progressed, and we're fully funded to complete all of those programs.'
Not music to all ears
While Antipa's plans to pursue a standalone development for Minyari Dome certainly make sense for a project of its scale, it does take away one of the potential planks that UK-based Greatland Gold might have been hoping to build its toll treating plans on.
Greatland had acquired Newmont's assets in the region – namely the Telfer gold-copper miner and related assets – for US$475m in December 2024, giving it control over Australia's third largest gold-copper processing facility.
This has the capacity to process between 20 million and 22 million tonnes of material though the UK producer has flagged that it is planning to use just part of this capacity and has promoted the potential for Telfer to be a processing hub using a hub and spoke strategy.
While the removal of Minyari Dome from consideration does put some doubt into the viability of this plan, there are other junior companies operating in the region that might be amendable to a toll treatment strategy.
One company is Encounter Resources (ASX:ENR), which regained full control of its Yeneena copper project in late May 2025 after IGO (ASX:IGO) withdrew from their joint venture.
Yeneena is a large-scale copper-cobalt project covering +1450km2 of ground in the Paterson Province about 60km southwest of Telfer.
It benefitted from some $15m in exploration expenditure – including diamond and aircore drilling, and regional-scale geological, geochemical and geophysical surveys from IGO over the six-year farm-in that generated an extensive dataset.
The company plans to assess this dataset to refine and prioritise the next phase of exploration, which could include the potential for depth extensions to the BM1 high-grade copper oxide discovery and testing the large copper leakage anomaly identified at BM5.
Previous drilling at BM1 had returned assays such as 20m grading 2% copper from a down-hole depth of 22m, 10m at 6.8% copper from 32m, and 18m at 3.2% copper from 32m.
St George Mining (ASX:SGQ) also holds ground in the Paterson Province with its project covering more than 35km of prospective stratigraphy, with potential similarities to the stratigraphy that hosts the mineralisation at Winu, Nifty and Telfer.
Drilling by the company has confirmed the presence of chalcopyrite and metasediments, the lithology known to host base metal mineralisation in the Paterson region.
