EXPLORATION & DEVELOPMENT

Alicanto unveils 'amazing' Sala with 'immense' upside

ALICANTO Minerals managing director Peter George has never one to spare superlatives when describing the company's flagship Sala lead-zinc-silver project in Sweden, but now he can back those words up with some hard numbers.

 Sala

Sala

He's previously described the abandoned mining area as "amazing", but with the release of its "global scale" maiden resource just over a year of taking ownership, he says the potential for Sala is now clearly "immense".
 
Drilling has delivered the company an initial inferred resource of 9.7 million tonnes at 4.5% zinc equivalent, using a 2% cut-off, for 311,000t of zinc, 44,000t of lead, and 15 million ounces of silver.
 
Within the resource is a high-grade core of 4.5Mt at 6%, containing 8.5Moz silver, 201,000t zinc and 23,500t lead, using a 4% cut-off.
 
Lowering the cut-off to 1.5% delivered a resource of 19Moz silver, 389,000t zinc, and 63,600t lead.
 
Encouragingly, Sala remains open in all directions, and with drilling ongoing, the company is hopeful of rapid, substantial growth.
 
Results due in coming weeks from the high-grade breccia zone that delivered intercepts such as 4.7m at 24.4% zinc, 875 grams per tonne silver and 3.7% lead from 259m in recent times.
 
An effusive George said it was an outstanding resource in scale and quality, and it still had plenty of highly prospective targets to drill, including below the Prince and Sala lodes.
 
For comparison, in its early stage of drilling, Sala compares well with Boab Metals' 75%-owned Sorby Hills project which has 800,000t lead, 1000t zinc and 30Moz silver - a remote resource in Western Australia's Kimberley that has seen four phases of drilling over more than decade.
 
George says Sala is now the largest active undeveloped zinc-silver deposit in Sweden, a country with a significant operating polymetallic base metals mining industry, with plenty of mines in the Bergslagen district.
 
Sala is close to Boliden's 172Mt Garpenberg mine and Lundin Mining's 46Mt Zinkgruvan projects - major operating underground mines and has similar geology.
 
The Sala area was last mined some 70 years ago and has recorded production of 200Moz silver with grades of up to 7000gpt, plus 35,000t of lead.
 
Today's resource is the first for the emerging Prince lode, and also includes mineralisation that extends from the historical Sala mine, the main reason Alicanto pegged the area in early 2020.
 
It has since vastly improved its understanding of the geology and the potential of the area to continue to reveal its secrets.
 
Alicanto has cash of around A$6 million remaining from a $7 million placement at 13c last November.
 
After a bruising night on the market, shares in the junior were off 6% this morning to 7.4c, valuing it at $30 million.

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