CAPITAL MARKETS

Cooper plans to be regional explorer across overlooked areas

TWENTY Seven Co pair Ian Warland and Tim Armstrong have teamed up with accountant and geologist Michael Frayne to develop a new fledgling Australian explorer, Cooper Metals.

Cooper plans to be regional explorer across overlooked areas

Cooper was created in February to house projects across Western Australia and Queensland that are being secured from a range of vendors, with the trio seeking $4.5-4.8 million at 20c with the initial public offer being managed by Taylor Collison.

The company's flagship project will be the 100%-owned Gooroo gold project, covering 150sq.km near Yalgoo in WA's Murchison, which is being picked up from private explorer Nile Exploration.

Gooroo is close to Silver Lake Resources' Deflector gold-copper mine, and covers some 26km of the Gullewa greenstone belt.

There has been limited prior exploration due to a back of outcrop and a perception the underlying basement was granite until 2020.

Cooper sees potential for orogenic gold and VMS base metal mineralisation, similar to the Golden Grove operation, just 50km away.

It has a similar sized project at Yamarna, between Gold Road Resources' greenfields exploration tenure, and the Gruyere mine Gold Road shares with Gold Fields.

Yamarna covers parts of the Yamarna and Dorothy Hills greenstone belts, where the targets are structurally-controlled primary orogenic gold mineralisation.

There has been a historical intercept of 5m at 3.38gpt from 30m at Dead Dog.

Over in Queensland, Cooper has secured an 85% interest in Revolution Mining's former Mt Isa East copper-gold project, which covers some 1300sq.km, about 30km south-east of Mt Isa.

Cooper sees potential for iron-oxide copper-gold deposits linked to major structural features. The area has seen a fractured exploration with limited drilling.

Cooper has identified a number of ‘camp-scale' targets, and intends to conduct significant greenfields exploration over the entire tenure to locate and rank new prospects, saying recent exploration successes by the likes of Syndicated Metals and Hammer Metals show new discoveries have not been defined as anomalies in historical data.

Key areas include the Big Hill, Railway Fault, Yarraman, and Patricia-Albert trends.

Existing prospects include the Mt Zsu Sui 6km-long soil copper anomaly, where past drilling returned 16m at 0.46% copper from 44m, including 2m at 1.1% copper and 2.48 grams per tonne gold, and workings at King Solomon from which 894t at 5.3% copper has been recovered.

Following listing, Warland is expected to be the largest shareholder at 6.33%, with Revolution at 4.22%.

The company plans to spend up to $2.7 million at Gooroo, $1.6 million at Mt Isa East and $640,000 at Yamarna.

Its exploration strategy is largely to start with big regional surveys to narrow down targets.

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