ON the basis that copper is in line for a price rebound, and that there will be a resultant greater understanding of the need to find the next round of mine developments, the active junior explorers in the red metal could be in for a better year.
The use of active is deliberate because the cash squeeze on the sector has greatly reduced the number of juniors looking for the stuff, itself a positive for the long-term supply/demand equation.
There is an alternative for them — find someone else to spend the money.
That is exactly what AusQuest has managed to pull together in Peru, with its gutsy initiative to spend some money on geophysical work uncovering big copper-gold targets on Peru’s southern coastal belt, parlaying it in to free carried joint venture deals with some local heavyweights, Southern Copper and Zahena. The agreements cover up to $34 million in option payments and in-ground exploration expenditure on four targets identified by AusQuest in return for the majors earning 70 per cent interests, with the first of the drilling programs to kick off in the first half of the year.
All very interesting for a stock trading yesterday at 2.1c for a market capitalisation of $6.3m. But AusQuest also has Canada’s Semafo funding a pretty intense gold exploration push in Burkina Faso, starting about now, and it is a player in the nickel hunt in WA’s Fraser Range.
The Fraser Range ground position is to the east of Sirius’ Crux prospect which may or may not be the next best thing to Sirius’ world-class Nova-Bollinger discovery 60km up north. While AusQuest is working up some drill targets of its own, good news from Crux won’t hurt market interest in the stock.
