Collective drilling hard to grow to 10Moz

Collective Mining aims to grow its Guayabales gold-copper project in Caldas, Colombia, to 10Moz of gold equivalent in 2025, and will undertake a minimum of 40,000m of drilling this year to do so, executive chair Aris Sussman told Mining Journal.

"That is the number that gets the large miners over the line. It is hard to sell a large company on a 4Moz deposit. There's no question we already have that if we stop today and there's nothing else to find. Our goal is to take it to that major scale," Sussman said.

"10Moz is an arbitrary number, and I hope it's a lot more than that. Look at our former company, Continental Gold, we drilled off over 11Moz and sold it to one of the largest mining companies in the world [Zijin Mining], and that really needs to be our goal."

Sussman said that by drilling the project hard this year, and having some luck, it could be approaching the 10Moz resource figure by year-end.

"Our goal is to have the market believe there's a chance at 10Moz plus here. There's no question Apollo itself is already a multimillion-ounce system. It needs a lot of infilling to go to a mineral resource estimate, but I don't think it's the only one.

"We need to show the market that Apollo is one of a string of carrots stemming from Marmato, which is almost 9Moz next door," Sussman added. "This 5km-by-5km area is just impregnated with different styles of mineralisation. It's pretty remarkable, so we need to get the market to wake up to this potential. This year, we're going to wake everyone up with a drill."

In addition to continuing to drill at Apollo, the company expects to get drill results from holes it put into the Olympus and Trap targets at the end of 2023, which, if positive, will see drilling resume there in the near future.

Collective also plans to drill two new targets this year, Target X and Tower. The Apollo porphyry system now measures 520m in strike by 395m wide by 1,070m vertical.

"Target X looks like an Apollo dead ringer. It has the same surface geochemical signature, and we see both porphyry mineralisation, a copper-molybdenum signature overprinted by late-stage high-grade veins, the same ones that are at Marmato [Aris Gold's nearby underground mine development], the same ones that are Apollo," Sussman said.

Plutus is another target the company will drill again this year once it has completed an airborne geophysical survey to better target drill holes.

"After announcing a discovery at Plutus we made the rational decision that it is so big and vast that we better do airborne geophysics to try and help define where to drill better and not blow our brains out with gambling on hole [locations]," Sussman said.

Collective is ramping up drilling following the year-end break and expects to be working with four drill rigs within a matter of weeks and potentially going up to six rigs later in the year.

Shares in Collective Mining are trading at C$4.10, valuing the company at C$248 million