Savannah Resources Plc (LON:SAV) Chief Executive Officer David Archer caught up with DirectorsTalk for an exclusive interview to discuss the drilling of priority targets in Block 4, expected assay results and the location of their drilling.
Q1: How are you today David?
A1: Good morning, very well and pretty excited about our drilling programme in Oman.
Q2: Indeed. I saw that news was out today and that you’ve started drilling at your high priority targets in Block 4. Can you tell us what the objectives are for this drilling campaign?
A2: We’ve got a number of objectives, first up we want to confirm the high grades that were reported from the historical drilling at Aarja, the old copper mine that we’re testing at the moment in Oman, and we’re testing grades that included 18 metres at 4.7% copper and 33 metres at 3.35% copper. So what we’re looking at doing is evaluating the quality assurance and quality control aspects of putting together a JORC resource and this drilling will help sort of verify these historical results. There’s just a terrific legacy of information here, there’s something like 100 holes that were drilled historically for something like 20,000 metres of drilling so that’s an enormously valuable data legacy that we’ll be able to leverage off. The second thing is, of course, to prepare and assess a JORC resource at Aarja, clearly that’ll be based off that very good legacy drill hole database of 100 holes. So we’ll be just doing a minimal amount of drilling to really sort of verify the quality of that historical drilling and off that historical database, we’ll be able to pull together a JORC resource, hopefully by the end of this calendar year which will be a major milestone for the company. I suppose the other element to the overall programme is to test some very high value VTEM targets that we’ve identified as a result of an airborne survey and these are effectively sort of greenfield targets, high risk, high return style of targets but most of the mined copper deposits in Oman have been discovered using this technique so we’re hopeful that sort of track record of success for this technique will be shown to be the case here on these 2 targets, VTEM target 4 and VTEM target 13.
Q3: When do you expect to get the assay results?
A3: The first sets of results should start flowing in from about 2 weeks so we’ll be releasing those as they come to hand and are assessed so should have quite a strong flow of news going up to the end of the year.
Q4: Ok, that’s good news. David, can you tell us a little bit more about the location of the drilling?
A4: Yes, I think that’s probably pretty key actually. It’s just immediately around the Aarja pit which was successfully mined in the 1990’s, it’s beautifully placed; very close to infrastructure both roads, copper smelter is a few kilometres down the road and about 50 kilometres away you’ve got the export Port of Sohar, and there’s good power nearby etc. so it really ticks all of the boxes in terms of its location and any development there should be relatively low cost, both in a capital sense and an operating costs sense. It’s certainly very much Savannah Resources’ objective to work towards bringing some of these opportunities into production within 2 years.
