Fiji lies in the so-called ‘Ring of Fire’ which contains many of the world’s major gold and copper deposits
Quick facts: Thunderstruck Resources
Price: 0.045 CAD TSX-V:AWE
Market: TSX-V
Market Cap: $2.61 m
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- Fiji has high-grade zinc, copper, silver, and gold potential
- Proximity to Asian markets and good infrastructure, skilled workforce
- Experienced management team
What Thunderstruck Resources does:
British Columbia-headquartered Thunderstruck Resources Ltd (CVE:AWE) (OTCMKTS:THURF) is a small exploration group focused on Fiji where, according to the firm, there has been no major exploration for up to four decades.
That said, there is a history of mining in the country, which is an archipelago in the South Pacific comprising more than 300 islands.
Fiji lies in the so-called ‘Ring of Fire’ which contains many of the world’s major gold and copper deposits and Thunderstruck holds around 4% of the ground of the main island called Viti Levu, where there is already two gold mines. They are Tuvatu, which is owned by Lion One Metals (CVE:LIO), and the Vatukoula mine, which has mined over seven million ounces of gold with a remaining resource of around four million ounces and has been in production on and off for 80 years.
Thunderstruck holds four high-grade projects – two of which are confirmed, high-grade zinc, copper discoveries. These are Nakoro and Waialeka.
Mining major Anglo Pacific in the 1970s spent nearly C$10 million (in today’s dollars) drilling these two assets and hit grades as high as 12.7% zinc and 2% copper over mineable widths.
At Thunderstruck’s Korokayiu (formerly Wainaleka) zinc, copper asset, the firm struck a joint venture in February with Japan Oil, Gas and Metals National Corporation (JOGMEC), which is due to spend C$3.5 million over three years from March 2019 to March 2022 for a 70% stake. Drilling has started there.
The firm also holds the copper porphyry Rama Creek project and the high-grade epithermal gold asset called Liwa Creek.
At Rama, a discovery hole by Anglo Pacific hit 244 metres (m) at 0.22% copper between 6m and 250m, and 0.23 grammes per tonne (g/t) gold between 6m and 72m, meanwhile Thunderstruck has recently doubled the copper-gold target to a 1.5-kilometer (km) potential strike length.
At Liwa Creek, 1989 trenching results included 15m at 1.9 g/t gold and 5.5m at 2 g/t of the yellow metal.
The Liwa Creek gold project bears similarities to both the Tuvatu and Vatukoula mines, according to Thunderstruck, and is within 50km of both. And because these assets were drilled in the 1970s by Anglo Pacific there is an abundance of historic data available to the company and potential partners.
How is it doing:
A ten 10-hole drill program funded by JOGMEC kicked off in August at the Korokayiu project in a bid to verify historically drilled copper-zinc massive sulphide mineralization through twinning of a number of the historic Anglo Pacific holes. Work was also aimed at potentially expanding the copper-zinc mineralization.
A third hole has recently started, while a ground geophysical survey successfully identified several anomaly targets, including an east-northeast trending gravity anomaly coincident with the historically drilled Korokayiu massive zinc-copper sulphide deposit.
The survey also showed the 1.4km length strike potential of a favorable host structure.
Meanwhile, this month the company also reported results from 29 surface rock geochemical samples at the Liwa Creek gold prospect, where eight returned values greater than 1 g/t gold and 10 g/t silver, and up to 41.6 g/t gold and 1,205 g/t silver.
Additional prospecting within the Liwa Ridge area has also returned the highest gold assay to date from this showing, from a large 0.5m boulder.
Two separate samples from the large boulder returned assays of 11.1 g/t gold and 8.5 g/t gold, in addition to 27 g/t silver and 109 g/t silver.
Thunderstruck also told investors that a recently completed M.Sc. academic study on Liwa Ridge found that mainly the property shows characteristics of both high and intermediate-sulphidation epithermal deposits.
In April, the firm closed an offering raising C$104,411 gross after issuing over 1.2 million units at C$0.07 each.
Inflection points
- Drilling and exploration results
- More joint venture news
