Peter Duerden has started as managing director of Battery Minerals ahead of the resumption of drilling at the Stavely-Stawell copper-gold project in Victoria for 2022.
Duerden's appointment was announced in November 2019 but he didn't get his feet under the desk at Battery until early January.
His appointment sees executive chairman David Flanagan revert to a non-executive role.
Duerden, who holds a Masters of Economic Geology and is a Registered Professional Geoscientist, was most recently MD at New South Wales-focused explorers Magmatic Resources and Sky Metals, and has also worked on exploration teams at Newcrest Mining and Alkane Resources.
Battery will resume drilling in Victoria later this month, with an aircore rig expected to return to site on Australia Day.
Aircore drilling activity will focus on defining gold-copper targets in the Frying Pan-Cosmopolitan-Cox's Find prospect areas and will be supported by four-acid geochemical analysis and the Falcon airborne gravity surveying.
Despite being well over 700sq.km in size, the Stavely-Stawell project has had just 1100 holes drilled into it at an average depth of just 36m.
The project features historical mines that have produced 100,000 ounces of gold at 22 grams per tonne gold, most of which have never been drilled.
There's been no significant exploration across the land package since the early 1990s.
Up until the end of November, Battery had completed 9210m of aircore drilling at the project, which highlighted a 1600m-long, plus-0.1 gram per tonne gold anomaly at the Nine Mile prospect.
The ground is also prospective for copper, sitting along strike from Navarre Minerals' emerging Morning Bill precious and base metals discovery.
Battery raised roughly A$2.7 million just before Christmas, which will fund 2022 activities.
The raising will also fund an exploration program at the Russell copper project in Western Australia's Kimberley region, which was acquired in mid-2021.
The combined tenement package in the Halls Creek tectonic zone comprises 258sq.km of highly prospective geology.
Historical exploration has mapped a copper-bearing trend over 8km over granted tenure and extends at least a further 6km into application ELA80/5348.
The project has only been subject to 13 drill holes, but rock chips have returned up to 30% copper from surface.
Battery is finalising drilling targets and will conduct an extensive heritage assessment ahead of drilling later in the current half.
Battery was previously focused on advanced graphite assets in Mozambique but announced a deal in August 2021 to sell them to Tiripati Graphite for $12.5 million in cash and shares.
The deal is pending Mozambique government approval and when it closes, Battery will be Tirupati's second-largest shareholder and retain exposure to the project.
