Major Central Australian copper project poised for expansion

The company behind a potential copper mine on Jervois station in Central Australia has taken over the land tenement next door.

Both the Jervois project, approximately 270 kilometres north east of Alice Springs, and neighbouring Unca Creek tenement, about 350 kilometres from Alice Springs, are now 100 per cent owned by KGL resources, with the former gaining major project status earlier this year.

The deal was finalised with company Natural Resources Exploration last Friday.

KGL Chairman Denis Wood said the company had been negotiating the acquisition for quite some time.

“Since the 1950s there’s been a lot of exploration done at Jervois and to some extent Unca, today a lot of it’s largely been unsuccessful, or there’s lots of mineralisation over the extend of both the leases, but he picture hasn’t come together yet,” he said.

“The board of KGL is feeling comfortable at this stage that we may have located the processes of exploration necessary to unlock the key.”

Copper exploration is the focus

Wood said there were good signs of copper extending northwards from Jervois into the Unca Creek lease.

“As we get more and more confidence we realise that the whole strike line of mineralisation, which runs through Jervois northward, and well and truly into the Unca Creek lease, has some real potential as we change the drilling strategy.”

The lease had previously been held by Arafura in the past, and had been flagged for commodities copper and gold, as well as vanadium.

But Mr Wood said the company had looked at nothing else other than copper.

“We’re trying to simplify the process and get this thing into position where we can develop the mine, and it’s got to be quite robust quite financially.

Expanding Jervois

The tenement takeover comes months after the Jervois Copper Project received major project status from the Northern Territory Government.

Mr Wood said the new addition could mean expansion for the project in the future.

“It’s not immediate expansion, the hot spot in that whole area is Jervois, and that’s where the process will have to start from for this to be robust enough to start a mine.

“Should that happen, then the Unca Creek resource, if there’s some there, clearly is close enough to be processed though that Jervois infrastructure.

“We’ve been working with every cent, dollar and bit of effort we’ve got at Rockface. We’re working towards that and it’ll be on the back of that success that we will continue.”

Mr Wood reiterated that it was early days for the company at Unca Creek.

“We’ve got some magnetic gravity surveys that we’ll do over that lease prior to doing any drilling,” he said.

“Before we do anything we’ve got a process to go through to get a clearance certificate before we can actually do any land disturbance on the site, that includes drilling.”

Courtesy ABCNews