Chakana Copper

We've been getting a few eye-watering drill results from Chakana Copper (link and link) from their various breccia pipes, which has led to them snagging Goldfields into pumping a chunk of change into the company (link).

I've been casually following them and Soledad and I've always though that the breccia pipes are very small, and if there is a porphyry on the project, it would be too deep to do anything with.

So, I've finally managed to compiling the data into leapfrog (link).

We can see that Chakana have drilled 25Km of drilling but appear to have 4 of the ~27 breccias identified so far on the project.

Breccias everywhere

If we look a bit closer at the pipes....



Essentially the breccia pipes are very, very small, typically with a 50m x 50m surface expression, based on the 5 breccias that we have maps for.

BX1

This has received the most drilling and has produced the best results.


We can see that lots and lots of holes have been drilled down the guts of the BX1. However, unlike BX5 and 6 below, a few of the holes intersected a blind breccia body to the SW.

It also appears the the grades are decreasing with depth, but this may be a result of the holes leaving the breccias and drilling country rocks, but we can clearly see, the breccia body is small (75m x 25m with 300m vertical extent - of the >2% CuEq mineralization), but high-grade.

BX5

More drilling down the guts of the system, it is 50m x 50m, and has been drilled to 200m depth. It is lower grade than BX1, but consistently over 1% Cu. However, I'm not sure that this is good enough for a body that will be mined from underground, it may need to be >2% to be viable.

BX6

BX6 is another small breccia body, with more drilling down the middle. We have a high-grade (>3% CuEq) close to surface (supergene enrichment), before the hole pass into moderate grade breccias below. Nothing special here


I'm going to stick with my original opinions, even though BX1 shows that there are additional breccias that don't reach surface, I'm not convinced that Chakana will be able to define a significant resource at the project. They have enough drilling into the BX1, BX5 and BX6 breccias to give the market something, but my back of the envelope notes come up with ~2Mt, which isn't very much.


I can understand them flogging the porphyry potential. This is a valid model, but on their own sections they suggest that any porphyry body will be very deep and essentially unexplorable.

However, they have money from Goldfields, and would like them to move away from BX1 and drill a few holes into 5-10 different breccias to see they have other high-grade breccias similar to BX1 (e.g. Faro and Corral in the Western Breccia zone).



Unless they find something amazing, and demonstrate that they can find enough breccias to define ~5Mt of material grading >2% CuEq, I don't see much value in the project on its own. However, with Hercules next door, could there be potential synergies with Lincuna? If the breccia bodies could be mined profitably from underground, maybe Lincuna would like some highly profitable ore to process (as long as it isn't too expensive to add a copper circuit to their mill)?