Isabella Marie:
Mantle Minerals (MTL) is fully funded to begin a 250-hole aircore drilling program at it’s Robert’s Hill gold project in the Pilbara.
To discuss this and the company’s June quarterly report, I’m joined by Nick Poll, Mantle’s Executive Chair.
So Nick, in Mantle’s quarterly report, the company states that it has the finances to fully fund a drilling program at Robert’s Hill.
Nick Poll:
Yes, we’ve raised $1.7 million this year and we’ve kept our cash burn very low, which allows us to spend more money on drilling later on this year. So we are fully funded, ready to go.
Isabella Marie:
Nick, tell us about the program.
Nick Poll:
Well, we are going to use a drilling process called aircore drilling, and basically, it’s a cheap form of drilling, which we are going to use because we’re drilling underneath five metres of sediments that cover up the geology underneath, and we need to see through these sediments, past efforts to use geochemistry and geophysics haven’t worked. So now we need to just drill, and we need to do it the most effective, cheapest way possible, and that’s aircore drilling.
Isabella Marie:
What do you hope to discover in this campaign?
Nick Poll:
The exploration history in the area shows that we don’t need to discover a lot at this point in time. We could discover, say four metres at 0.4 grams per ton of gold, and that would be a great result.
Of course, we hope to strike the big one, but just because we don’t hit the big one straight off doesn’t mean we don’t have great results.
So we are chasing similar results that De Grey Mining had in their early days of exploring for the Hemi Discovery. They’ve now got 10.6 million ounces. If we discover four metres at 0.4 grams per tonne of gold, that would already be a great result.
Isabella Marie:
As you were saying, the drilling program is fully financed. Tell us more about that.
Nick Poll:
The first thing is we’ve raised $1.7 million this quarter, so that’s a great result in this market. And the second thing is we have a really low burn rate. I’m the only employee we use a variety of consultants that I’ve worked with over the last 35 years of my mining career. We are really excited about pushing ahead, using Great Drilling company, and great people to help us run the project in a campaign way. So this has helped us to keep our cost base very low and we are able to spend a lot more money on drilling.