Sunstone Metals Ltd (ASX:STM) managing director Malcolm Norris has delivered a video update on the company’s activities at the El Palmar Project in northern Ecuador and the Bramaderos Project in southern Ecuador.
Drilling in progress
The company’s recent porphyry discovery at the Limon target at Bramaderos is ‘very significant’ – the prospect looked geologically promising during earlier fieldwork and the drilling is now testing the hypothesis.
Drilling is now underway to test a significant epithermal target next to the porphyry, with upcoming assays due following drilling at the epithermal target.
Sunstone’s strategy is to continue growing the Brama-Alba gold-copper resource – it is confident that it will expand both the resource and the exploration footprint.
At El Palmar, drilling continues at a new porphyry gold-copper-molybdenum target (T2) identified east of the main El Palmar mineralisation – results are expected this month.
The company ended the year in a strong financial position, Norris said. At the end of December, the company had $11.2 million in cash and shares, and those shares are fully tradable. There are no plans to raise funds in the near term.
“We're in a substantial value creation phase here,” Norris said. “We're drilling some very exciting targets. The drilling looks good from the daily reports we're getting. So we're feeling very bullish about what's ahead of us over the next couple of months.”
Bramaderos Gold-Copper Project
The Bramaderos Project is conveniently situated next to the Pan American highway in southern Ecuador, within reasonable distance of available hydroelectric power, supporting the economics of potential development opportunities.
The project has gentle topography with an average elevation of around 1,100 metres above sea level and is close to commercial airports and significant population centres such as the city of Loja. The project has strong community support.
El Palmar Porphyry Copper-Gold Project
The ‘highly prospective’ El Palmar gold-copper porphyry project in northern Ecuador is 60 kilometres northwest of Ecuador’s capital Quito.
It sits on the regionally significant Toachi Fault Zone, in the vicinity of the one-billion-tonne Llurimagua copper-molybdenum porphyry deposit, and in the same regional structural belt that hosts the 2.6-billion-tonne Alpala copper-gold porphyry deposit within the Cascabel project.
Sunstone is acquiring 100% of the El Palmar project and currently holds 70% under a staged acquisition agreement signed on August 12, 2020.