STOCKHEAD | January 13, 2023
Two drill rigs are currently drilling Cortadera’s potential fourth porphyry. Pic: Getty Images
An initial 10,000m drilling program will test four porphyry targets as well as three other targets on the recently optioned AMSA landholding.
The company has started the new year with a bang as one diamond drill rig – operating on a double shift basis – and one reverse circulation rig are back in operation, testing Cortadera’s potential to host a much larger copper porphyry cluster than originally defined.
Hot Chili (ASX:HCH) has more than doubled the strike length of the discovery from 2.3km to 5.2km, increasing the near term material resource growth potential.
Both drill rigs are busy drilling Cortadera’s fourth porphyry, where previous historical drilling intersected shallow copper-gold porphyry mineralisation at 128m grading 0.5% copper equivalent (0.4% copper and 0.1g/t gold) from 28m.
Key growth activities on track for delivery this year
HCH says it is well funded to complete its planned drilling and deliver the next set of key growth and development milestones for Costa Fuego this year, which include a Preliminary Economic Assessment (PEA) in the first half of this year and a resource upgrade in the second half.
It hopes to potentially up-scale Costa Fuego’s future annual metal production rates, currently being studied at up to 100,000t copper and up to 70,000oz gold for a +20-year life of mine.
Hot Chili intends to deliver Costa Fuego’s Pre-feasibility Study (PFS) by 2024 and remains on-track as one of only a few near-term production projects in the world capable of producing +10,000tpa copper in the next five years.