Talk about good luck. An exploration team at Boss Energy’s (ASX:BOE) Honeymoon project announced on Wednesday that its latest drill run on-site has successfully found what it was looking for.
Only thing is, that isn’t uranium. In this instance, the company went on the hunt for copper at Honeymoon – and copper it received in drill cores. That means the project now boasts the two hottest commodities of this year – uranium and copper.
That’s the lucky part.
For the record, it’s technically not Boss itself doing the drilling – it’s privately held Vancouver-based First Quantum Minerals (FQM).
Boss roped in FQM on a farm-in deal where the latter can earn up to a 51% interest in the base metal endowment at Honeymoon by spending a relatively paltry $6M on exploration and a further 24% interest by sole-funding all expenditure up to a final go-ahead.
This, according to Boss, allows it to remain “fully-focused on its core business of uranium exploration while having exposure at no cost to the significant potential of a base metals exploration program.”
Read: exposure to a currently trending commodity.
Copper prices keep going past US$10,000/tn, a key psychological benchmark for traders swapping futures contracts for the electrification metal.
Copper has had a stellar run YTD since Chinese smelters started cutting back on output given poor margins. On a yearly basis, the metal’s value is up 31.25% to USD$4.90/lb as at 9.30am AEST.
Copper prices are also what’s driven BHP to lob a bid at Anglo American, according to many analysts (the latter has since restructured to fend off formidable vultures.)
So, that’s all well and good for Boss Energy, who stands to benefit (or not) at no cost to itself.
But then there’s the unlucky part. Because on the whole, what FQM found isn’t particularly compelling – grades were far from exciting. Then there’s depth.
Boss Energy reported a 16m section at 0.27% copper at depths of 288m and a second section at 47m length, grading at 0.19% copper, however, buried under 404m of dirt.
Probably not the kind of results that get microcap watchers salivating, and almost definitely not the kind of grades that warrant spending millions of dollars on getting that deep in the first place.
That probably won’t stop FQM from still sniffing around the place, given copper prices. But if Boss Energy wants to see a base metals payday, drillers might need better luck.
BOE closed on Tuesday at $5.66.