Argonaut Resources gains long-pursued right to drill for huge Lake Torrens system

The Torrens Project drilling site, near the Olympic Dam, Prominent Hill and Carrapateena mines.
Image courtesy Argonaut Resources

Argonaut Resources gained approval in 2018 to drill for a large iron oxide copper-gold system at Lake Torrens it believes could be bigger than the nearby multi-billion-dollar Olympic Dam mine, one of the world’s largest copper deposits. It is also near Oz Minerals’ large Prominent Hill and Carrapateena mines.

The final approval for Argonaut Resources ended 20 years of trying to gain access to the giant Torrens anomaly.

Argonaut Resources’ 30-hole diamond drilling at the Torrens site will test to an average depth of 1000 metres over 210 square kilometres. Within this larger anomaly, there are 10 target zones, each large enough to have a world-class deposit bigger than the US$1 billion Carrapateena mine being developed nearby.

Listed on the Australian Security Exchange, Argonaut has copper and zinc projects in Queensland and Zambia plus lithium projects in Ontario, Canada. In South Australia it also holds the Alford tenement and has a joint venture with Perilya targeting zinc silicates at Aroona.

But its focus is now firmly on the Torrens project with approvals and funding in place after a long pursuit.

Historically, operators of the Torrens Project hadn’t been able to secure all agreements with Aboriginal claims to native title. Overlapping claims were heard by the federal court between October 2015 and February 2016. In August 2016, the federal court dismissed all three native title claims over the Torrens anomaly. The full court dismissed all three appeals by a 2-1 majority in March 2018.

With the copper price recovering more than 50% from its 2016 low, the commodity is now thought to be in a sustained upswing with demand growth exceeding new supply.

The ongoing demand growth is being supported by urbanisation trends such as electric vehicles needing much more copper than conventional cars.