folks Michael from Gest bringing you another episode in the things you need to know Series today we're talking about things you need to know before investing in Copper and we're joined by a guest in waren to help talk us through some of these topics so I Wallen is the managing director of coopa minerals who are an copper Explorer in the mount Isa region uh I wallen's a expiration geologist with over 25 years experience member of the AIG and notoriously or should I say famously known for his um 2006 recipient of Explorer of the year for the discovery of the Jin Ambrosia deposit for Inca so company making Discovery there uh if you appreciate Ian being here today to help us out then hit the thumbs up and if you want to consider supporting the channel then please check the details in the patreon below after you finished with the epod if you'd like to reach out to Ian I've also put his contact email in the description below as well so without any further Ado let's kick the tires light the fires what you need to know before investing in Copper with an warand all right so I thanks very much for joining us today I certainly appreciate you coming on help us find out a little bit more about copper and uh hopefully just explain some of the Nuance to uh the average sort of retail investor uh so uh I've already gone through and and given you a glowing wrap in the introduction uh so we don't need to go o over anything there so we'll just get straight into it if that's okay with you yeah sure sounds great Michael yeah all right good so um the first thing just to start off is uh people generally want to know uh we always see drill intercepts being announced put into announcements and you look at those results and it's hard to determine what is actually significant intercept or what is a a discovery hole or something like that what sort of grades should we be paying attention to uh to really get our attention and say hey this isn't just a little squib of copper this is sort of the real deal so if you got any advice when it comes to uh economic grades of copper and uh grade meters yeah look sure um I guess it's the first there's two points I'd like to make first up and is that in expiration we need usually set the bar pretty low as far as uh you know if when we start getting interested in any sort of copper intersection so CU we might we might get a snip of copper in a drill hole and we might have a tiger by the tail you know so to speak uh so and secondly you know a lot of people talk about copper equivalence because you know copper can occur with other other minerals like Molly and lead and zinc and silver and gold Etc so they talk in terms of Co equivalent now we're going to keep it pretty simple and we'll just talk about copper percent but I think the punters or the readers really need to know is that you know the average amount of copper in a rock you know it's about 50 PPM 50 parts per million and in M props it's it's high it's around 80 parts per million so if you're starting to get things around you know 100 times higher than 50 PPM copper you're up around the 5,000 PPM copper so that's half a percent copper so now that's starting to look really quite quite interesting um we can go into more detail about the sort of intercepts uh that I think are really interesting as well right so you'd suggest that um half a percent copper is where you would start to pay attention to start to think okay this is a roundabout the sorts of grades where something has economic potential and then from there you'd start to look at the the width of the intercept is that is that right yeah that that's a good point so it's really about the context of that drill hole right so if I'm looking you know there's really two types of main deposit Styles let's say there's large low grade style copper deposits like your forrey deposits and then there's the smaller sort of high grade medium style deposits so if you if you're getting half a percent that you know there's 100 meters of it or 200 meter long intercept and you know that they're looking for porw free then they're going okay well it sounds like they're they're onto a porw free system that's looking really that's looking really interesting um if you know that they're looking for more sort of smaller deposits like maybe volcanic massive sulfide deposits or epithermal or structurally control things then you you're going to see smaller intercepts maybe five M long downhole or 10 m long downhole but but higher grade you know the greater the 1% copper so it really does depend a lot on the type of deposit that you know that the company's really looking for and you need to understand that when you're looking at the drill hold data yeah and we'll we'll go into the mineral mineralization Styles a little bit later on um because there's a fair bit of uh I guess explanation that's required for people to understand just the very basics of those different mineralization types and so how you can then put it in context but um if I'm to look at a a copper drill intercept that say in the first 100 m right first below 100 m i mean generally we sort of say that a like an arm wavy rule would be that an open pit mine is good down to say 300 M um and then once you get below that you're sort of generally going sort of underground and so do you I guess consider is there any sort of Benchmark depths that you you keep in mind when you think okay well this is shallower than 100 m so you know half a perent okay here but once I get below 100 m or once I get below 300 M I need to step up to another sort of grade level would there be anything there that you sort of think of yeah yeah definitely um you're right so open Pits might go down to say 300 odd meters you're right um so we really is important around open pits is the is also the strip ratio as well so generally you want that strip ratio say less than 10 so you have to take out you know 10 blocks of waste for every one block of mineralization so if it's less than that that that's a good sort of rule of thumb and anything that's you know half anything half% 1% 1 and a half% copper for open pits is is fine but when you're getting into getting into underground then you're really looking at higher grade copper so you know greater than two 2% copper I just want to qualify that with I'm really talking about sort of the smaller higher grade deposits there like um um if you look at the grer in wa which was one of sire deposits that was a very high grade copper deposit about 5% Co I they could easily go underground on that sort of thing whereas big pull freeze again you know they because they're so large there's a lot of metal there it's low grade um it's much more bulk mining so they can get their cost down low then you can push the envelope and get into those lower braids but it's it's in that case where you really need to increase you through Point through the mill so you can still get a lot of copper metal out yeah so do you think as and obviously there's always exceptions to the sort of arm wavy rules because every different deposit is different and unique um and the costs are different in each different deposit as well but if you were to just take a 40,000 ft view of it and look at it you would you would generally say perhaps that um you know 2% would be a benchmark for an economic rate for underground mining and and and anything from half a percent you know up to 1% or obviously higher is is sort of good for open cut mining down to about 300 met would you say that sort of some R arm wavy guidelines yeah and I think that that's fair to say and we're really talking about Standalone deposits here as you know you know we're not talking about Brown Fields because obviously if you've got a a mine that you've already paid off and everything and then you st find a satellite or body then you don't need you're not going to spend as much money to mine that deposit because you've already got a mill sitting there ready to take the material so those parameters that you just talked about really around Standalone new deposits yeah new new new discoveries that's the sort of stuff that we we're on about so that that's good I think that gives us some good sort of uh rough guidelines for that now you often also see uh something that's called sort of percent meters which is reported um now uh we have gram meters a lot of people know sort of gram meters when it comes to gold and it's really just a reflection of well how many grams of ton total do I have in this sort of drill hole right and if you look at an intercept with the varying grades and the thickness of it if you do the gram meters it's giving you an idea of well overall I've got say 200 g per ton um G meters in this drill hole and you know that's sort of generally a pretty significant sort of intercept as an example is there uh something like that with copper as far as um percent meters is there a a magic number there when you look at that and say okay that is because if you have you know obviously 2 m at 4% even if it was in you know with uh less than 300 M deep you know You' say well that's great grade but there's just kind of not enough copper there to to worth you know to chase sort of thing so is there a um a percentage meters of copper which you think okay that represents enough copper to to potentially pursue yeah I I think around around the 20 M so that might be 10 m at 2% could be 5 m at 4% you know that's really starting to sound interesting that you've got um original that copper metal in in that intercept so if you you look at a sort of a a scale like a no Grainer so let's I'll go back to sire the bruer deposit you know the discovery hole I believe had around 47 m at 5.3% Copper right so that's over 200 copper percent met so here's something like that that's a Nob brainer that's amazing for of heat and in all things being it that should be a fabulous posit and we haven't really spoken about this yet but I'll just will qualify that with it does depend very much on how that drill hole intersects the copper mineralization so if it intersects it drills down the vein yeah quite easily get a long intercept at high grade if it's cutting across it which is what you want to try and do um then that's very important because you're getting closer to what the true width of the your body might be but in the very very early days so we might add a discovery announcement the company's not necessarily going to know at what angle they hit the mineralization because they don't just have they don't have enough data yet to know that so when uh one of your readers or investors out there hear this great interet 47 5.3% copper for instance if there's enough information in there to tell you what the sort of true width is that's very important to know because otherwise they mod just thre b b and got very lucky and got a very good result yeah yeah that's a um that's a good little red flag that you pointed out there and that's something that uh I've covered on the channel before with different companies there the true width of the mineralization and the orientation of the drilling and it's a good point as well that it's actually you need to do a significant amount of drilling normally before you can start to understand and calculate what that uh true width is so um I often see 100 100 I guess percent meters sort of thrown around as a a benchmark value for economic and even sort of underground so if that was 20 M at 4% or if that was 50 m at 2% that would sort of work um I guess uh 100 m at 1% do you think that we end up with the same number but a different sort of Economics around the viability or yeah 100 met of 1% I mean you'd be very happy with that and it comes back again to the context I was talking about so you know that that's probably pretty high grade for a a 4 three style mineralization um um and it's probably a bit low grade for more of these BMS style mineralization so I think you're more you generally 100 m% is is not a bad guy but it's more likely going to be um something that's like say 10 m 10 m at five or 10 right so something narrow and high grade or it's going to be something that's wider and lower bra so maybe 200 M at half a% um but that's a very helping number you know 100% met is very healthy yeah and obviously shallower you can get away with a lot less like you said before if you have a 20 M intercept at 2% copper you know below 100 m then um that's going to be be be pretty good so um now just on that as well something that I just wanted you to see if you could explain a little bit because uh often you see the um percent meters shown particularly when you look at a long section and it can be and it's shown just as a point but obviously that singular Point represents you know a width times the amount of copper that's there but then they only display it at a singular Point within the long section and I think that can be something that is um difficult for people sometimes to understand what the long section is actually trying to show so would you be able to talk a little bit to that as to what we're really looking for when we're looking at a long section yeah so a long section I guess for investors new to that is really a section that's taken parallel or a long strike of the or body so if the or body is striking in this direction then we're slicing it in the same direction the long Direction and looking the mineralization as spots like you said on that plane now we often use that in expiration because we want to know where most of the copper metal is and we want to Contour that up and see if there's any sort of Contour pattern um that comes out of that long section and often for instance you'll find with the deposits around Mount Isa which are often structurally controll I oxide po gold deposits that there is what we call a plunging component so the mineralization might be sort of plunging at an angle and when you start putting points in in that long section and contouring them up you can really easily see where that plunge component is and that tells the geologist and says oh well I should Contin continue to look in the direction where I'm seeing most of the metal you know so and it's a good way of of presenting to to the market where you know why you're Drilling in a particular direction or particular area because you're following the the high grve copper down at a certain angle so long sections are very good for that sort of thing yeah so long sections are more used to understand the orientation of the or body as a whole um as opposed to really get any sort of uh representation of like grade representation on a drill hole by drill hole basis would you say that's fair or yeah I think that's fair it really does give you good information about potential controls of the mineralization so you know in nature there's some sort of structures that are controlling where the highgrade copper mineralization is and the long section will often show you uh where that highr mineralization is and where it's likely to be at debth as well so it's really about understanding those controls of mineralization helping you develop your model yeah okay excellent all right so um this sort of leads on from you've already alluded to it before but obviously the uh the copper grades and significant copper grades do differ depending on the mineralization style right and there are a a group of of I guess mineralization Styles which um are commonly found now I they they are all a little bit different so it's it's not the sort of situation that all pories are the same although the sort of generic model for pores is generally sort of grouped together in in one sort of category so I guess if if I'm looking um to invest in Copper and a company comes out and says it has the can you just talk to about what are some of the Styles the general main styles of copper mineralization that we find and if you can give just a very very brief explanation of I guess the differences between them um that would be super useful I think yeah sure okay so like if you're invest get on Google and they Google what where does most of the copper come from they'll find out that it you know it basically comes from for free deposits right so 10 of the biggest mines at the moment six six of those are por frees from South America and chw and Peru and they can produce like hundreds of thousands of tons of copper per year which is a huge amount and the the biggest one of the one of the best well known ones is bhps sandida mine in Peru which you know produces about a million tons of of of copper a year but but closer to home you know we've got the Cadia deposit and central New South Wales which is a very important porree deposit for for Australia and uh you know so I look at uh uh por free is very important but they're large low grade things other sort of large deposits that you can get or intrusion style related deposits at iron oxide copper gold deposits we've got those in South Australia like Olympic Dam of course in prominent Hill and also Earnest Henry up in in Mount Isa there's some other really important copper style deposits of the sediment hosted ones in in Africa so you got the Zambian copper belt deposits um there's a lot of those style deposits in the Congo and then you've got your smaller higher grade ones that we've sort of alluded to like the volcanic massive sulfide deposits scan deposit smaller iocg deposits and structurally controlled copper gold deposits all right um we might just go back Circle back to the beginning just talk about them all in a little bit more detail if that's okay so uh when you say a poery uh what is a poery yeah so pory deposits generally form around plate you know plate tectonic plate boundaries so you've got this major sort of plag boundary that runs up along the the western coast of South America and North America you've got the Pacific Pacific uh Ring of Fire we've got four3 deposits coming down through um New Guinea and as well and Indonesia so those sorts of areas now poery deposits are formed from so if you've got a a large magar magma at De um so molten rock essentially and then that creates this uh system of a um of hot water that gets circulated through the Rocks above it and that sort of strips out the Copper mineralization from The Source rocks and as that moves closer to surface that will drop out into a into a magma body and it sort of produces like a imagine a scone full of sultanas the sultanas being the the copper mineralization so you just get this this dotted low grade copper mineralization through this massive sort of magma system that slowly cools itself and forms a a a PO copper or body and it can have other metals associated with it like gold and Mum of course and and other minerals as well yeah because um the POR freeze yeah they're are meibum por freeze they are copper por freeze and then like you explained before there's of often um copper equivalents where you know copper might be the primary mineral but there are low levels of of other elements involved as well so there I guess a a granite poyy sort of system can apply to a few different styles of mineralization but copper is is what they're very much known for so it's a a giant granite pluton in the in the earth and all the the hot fluids that have come off it have um basically scavenged the Copper from elsewhere and from that that magma source as well and that's what we're looking for right so so are we generally looking in the poery Granite itself for the mineralization or are we looking on the edges of it we're generally looking in the poery granite mineralization itself and having said that above the POR free you may get some more epithermal vein style mineralization closer to surface so you often here companies are drilling they're looking for a paw Frey they drill down they hit a narrow highr mineralized uh vein and that's part of the epithermal system that's related to a deeper porree deposit at debt so these things are quite zoned and they the zonation of these deposits as well and the alteration systems are really quite well documented now so if explorers hit different um uh alteration zones they may know that they're getting closer to the porre mineral mineralization itself I should mention that porry deposits sort of relatively young compared to iron oxide copper gold deposits so you know um a lot of por frees are formed closer to to surface so they don't have a huge preservation age you know so a lot of them are less than 20 million years old because they tend to form near surface and then they get eroded off over over Millennia time so they tend to be reasonably you know younger stle of of of copper deposits yeah now there is something about porree that I think is worth exp uh exploring a little bit and that's more that um and and I don't know whether or not a poery deposit could be a potential red flag in the right circumstances because uh my understanding is that uh a pyy poy style mineralization is can be quite difficult for a junior Explorer to tackle and I was wondering if you can I guess uh just add any illumination as to some of the difficulties of I guess defining um exploring and then ultimately going into mining of a poery system like why is it that they are these the biggest sources of copper in the world but generally uh if I could find any type of mization as an Explorer I wouldn't want to find a py yeah no that's a good point I think it's because because there such large low braid systems you they generally might be say you might have like a th000 M intercepts that could be you know anywhere between .1 and. 5% 6% pop up in that intersect um so you have to drill that with diamond drilling for a start you can't just be drilling it with RC because they're going to be de holes and uh when you start drilling Diamond you know you're looking at a well almost four times the cost of RC so it might cost you 400 odd dollars a meter all up compared to 15 50ed with RC so it's expensive to drill out a p and often you don't know like you've got to put a lot of holes into a py because they're a big body of rock before you can work out what's the potential resource that I've got here so you might have to put you know um a thousand more than a th000 kilm of drilling into this stting to work out how much mineralization you've got so that that can only really be done by companies that have very deep pockets and you know lots of money to do that um whereas smaller high grade things um you know they don't need anywhere near as much drilling they might be closer to surface so they're cheaper to delineate they may not have as much copper metal but they'll still have enough hopefully copper metal to make your Junior company you know um yeah worth 100 times more than it was before it found it for instance so so not only is it going to be super expensive to drill out and Define uh that's a a large cost outly before you even really know how much metal is there and then the porr system might not actually be large enough to support the capex required to process that many tons to get a benefit from it so you've got a a large expiration cost associated with it before you even find out if it's worth spending that money on it um and then as well if it does fall short in the size in the scale then there might not be enough copper there to justify the size of the plant you'd need to to process it I imagine yeah no that's a good point so you you tend to find that if a junior gets onto a PO free deposit you know they're not going to be around able to raise enough money to to drill this thing right out so they they're better off you know trying to get a JV partner generally which will will take ownership of it and fund it uh because it could could take a few years to to actually drill that deposit out to ghetto resource before you can start doing any sort of scoping studies and working out your Capital cost like we just talking about I mean as an example like you know a perfect sort of deposit in my mind to find and I hark back to uh to the bruer in wa you know that um when sire found that you know that basically from Discovery to mining was three years and the way the reason they were able to be would do that is because as soon as they hit it they hit a very high grade decent intersect um they started drilling around that they out to get work out what the resource was quite quickly and it was high grade wasn't the biggest deposit in the world it's like 11 almost 11 million tons it's a five 5 and a half% copper and it had quite good gold grades associated with it as well but a bit of a no-brainer that this thing's going to become a mine it's not very deep it's high grve and so they're able to get it to um mining phase very quickly and fund it as as a junior as well with they Genera a lot of excitement in the market right excellent no that's excellent uh now just on to icgs if you don't mind so icgs uh yeah iron oxide iron oxide copper gold and there's another type as well an iscg is that right iron sulfide copper gold so exactly um I can go into the sort of differences there there was a South Australian company minor that did a lot of good work around this they were exploring in the mount iser region so you've got your iron oxide copper gold so that basically the they're associated with iron oxide such as hematite and magnetite and so if they've got magnetite associated with them that they generally have a magnetic anomaly and that's how you know Ernest Henry was founded at a booming mag anomaly and a booming booming gravity anomaly and even though that deposit is blind that means it's Undercover the geophysics footprint was so good you know they drilled it and hit mineralization Etc so that's how a lot of the iron oxide copper gold deposits have been found with with with geop physics usually focusing on the mag and gravity in the right structural and geological locations for those deposits so other examples of those might be you know Olympic Dam obviously is something that we all know and and love um what else have we got that ER caratina in the G Craton as well so you know the G Craton essay is very well known on offside copper gold Province yeah and um look Juniors do have a go at those deposits but they they they can tend to be especially in the Goa quite deep so um you know if anyone's interested in Discovery history look up caratina because that one's a really famous one for a guy that went went went goed alone basically couldn't get anyone interested got some government funding and and discovered um you know cartina that was R GES which is a pretty amazing story sort of going up on a tangent there no that that that's actually important because uh much like we were talking about the pories in the size and the scale and then the difficulties in in drilling those um when we look at uh iocg and we look at things like Olympic Dam or you it doesn't matter what iocg we talk about that we know they all seem to be these really large systems now is that because the mineralization are just by Nature large occurrences or are there a lot of small iocg occurrences as well but they're just perhaps not economic to to mine for example yeah I think with ocgs you do see a lot more of a full spectrum of sizes so you've got the giant deposits like you said Olympic Dam prent Hills big and Ernest tenen is like 180 million tons of of oil roughly around 1% copper plus some gold so they're they're the big ones but it is a a skewed population so you know you have a a few of the Giants and then you have you do have quite a lot of smaller iocg so um L and in the mount Isa area it's a significant deposit but it's around 11 million tons you know so that's uh you know 12 of the size probably of Ernest Henry but these smaller deposits can can be sort of higher grade icgs and they're very very very valuable deposits um right L is obviously being an obvious example and so is Osborne and C for and a bunch of others in the mount Isa region yeah so those are the two regions when people talk about icgs I normally hear sort of the Gaton um and then the mount Isa region as the two most prevalent sort of occurrences of of icgs I know obviously we have tenner Creek the tenner Creek area as well that's right but those those ocgs have are a little bit different from the others as far as the actually because they're predominantly a gold iocg is that right yeah I think that there's there's uh more sort of gold Rich iron rich ones sort of associated like around tenic Creek um that that have associated with iron formations as well yeah and then you've got know basically Olympic Dam that's got associated with uranium as well so it's a basically an IOU CG uh so there are there are you know different varieties of icgs and one of the ones that we we would I'm more interested in are probably the is CGS the iron sulfide copper gold deposits and I just uh was just talking about how minor had done a fair bit of work on that and iron sulfide so instead of instead of being associated with the oxide minerals like hematite and magnetite they're more associated with things like tyde and ptite so they're more suide minerals and they occur in what we call more reduced terrains so um terrains that have more sort of carbonaceous material or graphitic material and that helps produce these iron sulfide copper gold deposits and you explore for them very differently so it's it's very important to understand what you're looking for and with isgs you know the minor guys got on to the fact that if you use electromagnetics like air electromagnetics you more likely to find these iron sulfide top of golds rather than the iron oxide coer Golds and and LOE sorry L is more of an iron sulfide popper gold style of deposit yeah so uh we'll see in announcements when people are talking about geophysical surveys um the to detect those sort of massive sulfides and those iscs uh they will say it's an em survey right we did an em survey and uh so that would be targeting that uh but if you were looking for an iocg uh you would generally just be looking for a coincidental magnetic and gravity anomaly and do you see uh the magnetic and gravity anomalies associated with the isgs as well yeah you can definitely get a gravity anomaly associated with it and you can get um magnetite rich areas so the iscs can have a zonation where they will have a more magnetite Rich um component to it ptite can be mag can be magnetic so it itself can have a magnetic anomaly associated with it and I believe L was found with magnetics but right next thought L for instance you've got Jericho deposit which you know the minor guys found something years ago and that I believe was based on an em survey so the purite pyite chap pyite had a lot of sulfide associated with it and they picked that up in the electromagnetic survey so that's what led to to that discovered again Jericho was was undercover so you know there was no rocks at surface yeah yeah and um and just one more point before we move on from the ocgs because there does there seems to be a different depth occurrence between sort of the mount Isa region and and the Olympic Dam sort of region um a lot of the Olympic Dam targets seem to be you know 500 M to a kilometer undercover um how deep are they up around sort of um Ernest Henry and mount EA yeah so they so turn is about 50 m deep so it's overlay by uh Rous sediments I I believe so it's undercover so um similarly I think Osborne is is about 50 m deep as well so they're not particularly deep not when you compare it to U some of the posits in the in the go Craton like cartin it's got five 500 met deep so that that that that's another potential I guess um um something for investors to be aware of if they're looking at expiration companies which are targeting icgs you really need to be aware of sort of the province that they're in because I guess you know when you look at the cost of a 1 km deep Diamond Drill Hole uh you know it's really it's almost what $500,000 to a million dollars to drill that hole probably and you you you're only getting sort of one or two holes at hitting that Target uh and then I imagine the target's got to be significantly bigger and higher grade in order to obviously carry being that deep whereas if you're looking at investing in a copper company that's targeting icgs in Ernest Henry area well you can afford to drill a lot more holes um and I would say probably a greater chance of success um would that be fair to say or would that be a fair consideration do you think yeah it's a fair consideration I think when when you're looking in terrains like the G cron which you know the the B B is really quite deep so it might be 500 M deep you're heavily riant on obviously geophysical techniques like ma magnetics and gravity and so you're looking at Big signatures uh from that so when you do drill down into a big signature style of um from geop physics you're hoping to find a big deposit if you know what it mean whereas the the EM that you use up in um say in Mount Isa area like you know those systems aor systems might look up to 200 meters deep um so you can look for more smaller discrete uh anomalies you know and you and you can find smaller discrete deposits and they should be closer to surface and potentially you know economic is they they're closer to surface so you you can find a smaller iocg I think in the mount Isa region because you don't have to deal with that huge huge cost that cover as much yeah so looking at the expiration company and how much money they've got in the bank versus how deep their drill targets are is probably something pretty important because um I guess you you if you're drilling really deep uh you only get a few few shots at it and uh and then you're out of money so all right that's good and um I guess the next we we sort of talked about the settlement hosted ones in Africa and so forth but I think we'll probably just probably a uh VMS is something that is often um talked about as well uh so this and these are kind of pretty cool systems I think that capture the imagination of a lot of people so can we talk a little bit about these I guess yeah sure uh I mean I started my career in VMS uh I was a mind geologist up at fanga um knch Towers right and it wasn't long after really Discovery in the opening of that mine and so fanga VMS was more of a poly metallic it's got zinc lead silver and copper and a little bit of gold as well but it was more of a zinc Rich style VMS and that's the thing with VMS is you can get the sort of copper style deposits which tend to be uh like a more um closer to the source so the the hotter temperature part of the VMS system and when you go into the cooler part of the VMS system you start to get the more minerals like like zinc associated with it now BMS is tend to be you know smaller than generally smaller than your Porres and ocgs so uh going back to our deucer example in wa from sandfire you know that was almost 11 million tons now that's that's a VMS deposit and the fanga deposit from memory was also around 12 12 million tons of a so they're smaller smaller systems and they're really interesting systems because a lot of a lot of your readers have probably seen um documentaries with these black smokers on the sea floor and and basically they're still forming today these volcanic massive sulfide deposits are forming today in in plate boundary RI systems where you get these black smokers and the minerals are getting deposited right onto the sea Flor um you know as we speak so they're very interesting style of deposits yeah yeah so that's what that's that's how they're formed right so in Rift systems where you've got the hot fluids and the magma sort of coming up it makes the smokers the black smokers um they are shooting out the super heated uh fluid which is riched in metals and then that precipitates out and that is essentially the the VMS deposit isn't it yeah that that's essentially it and then eventually that will uh over Millennia will get covered up by sediments that just wash in over time and bury that deposit and then it turns into you know rock over Millennia time and gets uplifted towards surface so um you know that that's how they form and they get preserved but they're still getting you know formed today yeah but all all I mean really all three almost occurr in different occurrences right well um the we didn't really talk about the formation of the ocgs um I know there's some often continued debate about the formation of ocgs and and how it occurs but um I guess the pores it's the large granite pluton and it's the fluids that have have come off that um the uh VMS it's the uh Rift zones and the black smokers and often a marine environment originally that it forms in and the icgs how are they thought to sort of occur yeah I like the thing of them more really is um you know intrusion related systems so I icgs essentially um like in the mount Isa region for instance you've got um the this certain the certain granitic bodies like a Williams nalp around the sort of 1.5 billion years ago or the middle protozoic was a metallogenic rich U magma body that basically generated these heat cells into the overlying rocks and uh the the the pregnant fluids come up into the overlying Rocks um and then they hit a uh uh they travel in sort of oxidized fluids and they hit a a lower temperature reduced environment and the mineralization just drops out it's usually quite a strong structural control component to these mineralized bodies and there's often um bation associated with them too because they they're hydrothermal systems so uh you know this is a a breure style rock you can see here it's all been fractured and broken up and you can see the green copper mineralization within the Matrix of of that breure body so a lot of these iacg systems have a strong breaker component to them yeah I think that's an important point for people just to to think about with the icgs is that because you hear the word breter a lot in announcements but it's sometimes hard to know what it means so that rock that Ian just showed where the if you imagine the the existing rock is broken up and and fractured and then in all those those spaces you've got an infill of some sort of um of of mineralization and uh and that's often what we see with a lot of icgs isn't it yeah this is you know associated with oxide minerals such as hematide and magnetite now this is turned into girth as it's weathered over the over The Late years excellent no that's um that's excellent I think we've probably covered off on the main ones is there anything there you want to add before we move on to the next one next question yeah look I I think you know that they're always finding new copper deposits and uh you know generating new models for them but I I tend to think of these deposits a lot of these deposits as in intrusion related like I said the icg the pyy and even the you know the VMS systems are really just related to intrusions at depth that the basically create a heat cell that collect the metals and then that gets transported into um a trap site and with por the Trap site tends to be these big magma bodies but with uh High higher grade things like smaller ocgs that might be more structurally controlled and the mineralization might be more focused and you tend to get higher grades in more focused trap sites as opposed to lower grades in the broader trap side of a magnet that makes sense yeah no that does as well so now we'll move on to the next question question and uh this is largely around sort of indications that surface of memorization at depth and um one thing that people one of the most common questions that I get personally is Michael is there a way that I can tell if a surface sample is reflective of uh mineralization at depth so um now this is a this comes in a few different forms but generally they would say okay if I'm looking at um 200 PPM in soils of copper in soils you know does that generally mean that there's sort of Greater depth or can I can I correlate uh anything that's found at the surface with what's found at depth so there's a few things to discuss here one is um rock chip sampling uh because that's often something that we see a lot of um so if you can if probably M let's just start there with rock chips and we'll go into soil sampling next but um what can you really confer from Rock chips sing because we see every company when they first start exploring uh they go out and they get rock chips and then we often see as well companies go out to I guess historic workings and collect Rock chips from there now is that something that we should be I guess excited about or what what what does it potentially tell us yeah okay rock chips it's all I guess it's all about the context like you were just alluding to so firstly you know with rock chip you've got um you've got your oxide minerals like Malachite and azerite so you got your malachite in green that I'm showing here now that can be up to 60% popper in it so all the iron that was originally there is sort of rusted out and it's upgraded the copper mineralization so I can chip this rock in the field and I can you know get 30% copper in it and it sounds really quite exciting but it is an oxide mineral so you do expect higher grades now with a sulfide mineral so you can see this nice shiny yellow rock that I have here most of that is chaa pyite which is a copper iron sulfide and some pyite minerals as well now theoretically you know if I've got Pure chakra pyate I can get 30% uh Copper from from that but generally the the chak pyate rate is going to be quite low and so you're only going to get um you going to get much less like 1 or 2% chyro now at surface you know you're not going to find much chyro or pyro because it gets weathered out so you are left with this higher grade Malachite and azerite so that's the first thing we we're generally sampling these high grade oxide minerals so you need to take that into account um when you're looking at chips yeah so if I'm if I I'm walking around as an expiration geologist uh and I find some some rocks sort of outcropping and there's malachite on them I noticed the green and I think oh that's great and I break off a section of that and then go back to the market and say oh we've got um 30% copper in uh you know what what what as an investor is that really telling me yeah by itself not not a lot because you know especially in areas like M eer I can go to a lot of places and I can find some copper in the Rock chips and uh quite quite easily so when I would start getting I guess excited is uh if if the company has had a lot of rock chips and that you know they're starting to look at something that's got some strike length potential and some width potential and then I um like to see other information associated with those Rock chips so if they start to tell me well okay we've also got um a geophysical anomaly associated with this like induced polarization or em then I'll start to get excited because I think oh well that might indicate that um you know this mineralization that we seeing at surface might have some depth extent and some sort of critical mass to it because I I should bring up as well that um copper is quite a mobile element in the weathering environment so you know once it gets um into solution it can be sort of transported and redeposited somewhere somewhere else so um you may get a copper anomaly that is actually being transported away from its original stores so it's important to know where that copper anomaly has come from and there are ways obviously that you can do that yeah so unless unless I guess you have a direct say geophysical indicator that's directly associated with that rock chip then then uh it's less meaningful of what is at depth because it could just be some remobilized and then concentrated copper um that's just sort of doesn't really reflect anything at depth there so are there any red flags with rock chip sampling that if you saw a company doing this sorry if a company was was continually doing something you'd think oh hang on I feel like that's a bit dodgy or maybe misleading is there anything like that you can think of um yeah yes I think uh for sure if you're getting isolated Rock chips in an area where of high copy mineralization in an area where you know that that's fairly common then I wouldn't be particularly excited about that um so if let's say hypothetically um the thing to be to look out for is if there was a mineral like at the moment niobium is is really really hot in the market and if if you then went out to uh a prospect where you knew that you had say elevated levels of narium um but they never you know there was no real and just took a rock chip to say hey we've got elevated niobium as well that that would be the sort of thing that might get you sort of thinking because I have seen that recently say with uranium uranium can often be elevated in a lot of different or deposits of other Commodities and say it's originally a t a silver commodity a silver Target and now uranium starts booming so you go take a rock jet from the silver deposit and say hey we're we're perspective for Uranium as well yeah sure uh yeah yeah that's this is getting quite technical but you find um manganese so manganese for instance can just form in a weathering environment you got a lot of manganese in that particular Rock the manganese tends to scattering other based Metals as well so you might get a elevated copper lead and Zig associated with that mag manganese right now if someone finds a copper uh Rich rock chip and they say oh look it's got some rare earth associated with it some itum and they're looking for icgs then you might okay this is this is starting to sound exciting because they've got these other elements that we know are in these iocg deposits and it's it's also with the copper mineralization in the rock chip that they're found um we often look at selenium values so SE so selenium um if you find you've got elevated selenium with the copper in that particular gossen that can indicate that you know um it it comes it's derived that copper is derived from sulfites selinium with the sulfur so that that's a sort of a well-known you know way of delineating or ranking your copper anomalies from Rock chips in the mount Isa region people look at the selenium values as well the the rare earth values the eum values those sorts of things yeah all right excellent now that's a good um that's a good tip there um now with soil sampling I guess um when do you start to get excited about um copper in soils yeah and I think copper in soils is a very um it's very particular to the area that you are working and the style of the deposit that you're looking for so in man Isa for instance um let's say you're doing if you're doing soil sampling over a pelic rock which is a rock that's sort of high in silica um then you're going to generally have lower copper values but if I go 200 M away onto a mic Rock like a bass that's high in iron high in magnesium that's going to have higher copper background value so you have to know your geology for for the area before you start um ranking your your soil anomalies as well um and look I I look at basically the three C's I call it the three c's with um with copper anomalies in soils yeah what are they yeah so the three C's I look at the context okay so the context is what's the rock type I'm in that I just talked about what's the other any structural like bolts through there that could be transporting mineralization as as well um the second one I talk about is concentration so what's the concentration of copper is it is it 200 PPM is it 500 PPN is it a percent you can you can get very high values in in soil so concentration is important uh but the other thing that's really important is the coincidence you know so is it coincident with a geophysical anomaly or or right structures Etc yeah so yeah you can apply those three C's to the Rock chips as well can't you you could yeah and there is probably a fourth SE uh that I would would chuck in there and it's coherence right coherence is how coherent is that anomaly so say you've got a copper anomaly that's all broken up and it's potty and Str out you know that's not as exciting as a nice Bullseye copper anomaly that might have a nice coherent shape to it because then you think oh this thing's probably got a bit of critical mass behind it and it's coming from something real underneath so there's B sees I've just talked about yeah the the bullseye will often more like represent a diffusion from a source yeah right and so that's when you sort of know but whereas if it's if it is broken up and incoherent you think well there's some sort of movement or there's something that's happened here that's getting this sort of yeah no non-coherent anomaly and then um obviously makes it a lot harder to to Target as well so that's what you often see with rock chips right it's like a little bit here a little bit there and it's really sort of broken up and and not sort of coherent but the soils uh you want that good Bullseye and obviously the 3 C's as well so I think that's that's good is there anything I mean obviously it's the context uh which is super important but is there is there a number a throwout number that you could say there where if I have 300 PPM in soils um I would think to myself gez this is a really strong so anomaly like what what would people obviously the context is important but is there something a guide where people just say oh this is a strong soil anomaly because I I get it with lithium I get it with everything Michael is this a strong soil anomaly for that commodity type or not so for copper yeah what do you think would be a really strong soil anomaly number that would get your attention yeah maybe five times background so if your background is say 50 PPM copper and I'm getting things around 250 PPM copper yeah then I'm starting to that's five times background I'm getting pretty excited 10 times background look this is looking really interesting 500 PPM um poer as well so those sorts of values I think are really important but the all the Seas sort of make a good uh Copp make a good soil anomaly um I think all right and and one more you itself yeah one more one more thing to talk about here xrf results and readings uh we see xrf done on soils so we see sort of grid xrf sampling which is done and then we also see similar to rock chip sampling we just see the xrf done on rock chip and um have you got any any sort of quick thoughts on that yeah sure look I love xrf sampling in soils I mean it's been a fabulous um you know Boom for our industry so xrf probably came in about 15 years ago maybe a bit maybe a bit even longer um and they're very good for soil for copper in particular so an xrf gun basically you can take it anywhere you like you can shoot that soil sample and it'll give you a pretty accurate representation of the copper and a bunch of other elements as well 30 other elements but copper in itself is is particularly accurate and um we use and other companies use what they call standards so we will have a a little sample of mineralization which we know from the laboratory exactly what that copper value is and then we we use our xrf gun we shoot that and we shoot a number of standards and we compare um the xrf to the laboratory result and that gives us confidence that you know the copper value that we're getting in the soil we believe the thing about soil sampling compared to rock sampling for instance so with soil sampling you might go take a 100 um sorry let's say 1,000 grams or 1 kilogram of material yeah that you dug up um generally below surface because you don't want the surface contamination so you dig down maybe 10 or 20 cm and you get this material and then you can sa out the corser bits of rock Etc and then you're left with a basically a concentration of soil uh which you can analyze with the xrf so essentially your your you're getting an average of that area so a bit of a bulk sample right so it's more accurate with a rock chip you know I can get my xrf gun and I can shoot that bit of oxide mineralization there and you know I might get 40% popup yeah I can go to another part of that rock here where there's not much copper there and you know and I'll get next to next to nothing in the copper yeah because it's only pinpointing a very small as big as my fingernail area when it's anal izing it with with the xrx so it can be quite misleading for rock chips and I tend to only use the xrf on Rock chips when I'm trying to answer a specific question like okay what's the copper value of this massive sulfide mineralization out of interest you know yeah but for soil sampling it's xrfs are rapid you can deploy them in the field quickly you can check large areas very quickly we did over 8,000 portable xrf samples last year in the mount Isa region and delineated numerous sort of prospects from from using that methodology so I guess for for investors out there and people you know um xrf saw results um if the if the collection method is is good you can have a look at the form ones uh the table one at the back of the announcement as well as to how they did that then um then really no concerns there uh is probably a pretty very good tool for quick um and cheap exploration um but I guess uh just know the xrf results on Rock chips are only specific to the very mineral and and point on that rock that they actually hit so just need it's not reflective of the rock overall whereas with the soils it's more reflective of the soils overall so better there no I think that's excellent um now we'll just move on now to next question which is um I guess red flags and um and traps and tricks for new players when it comes to investing in Copper explorers and copper deposits uh examples you know I've had a very heavy Rare Earth focus at the moment on the channel and obviously with rare earth there are a lot of trips and and traps and things that if you weren't informed you wouldn't really know when you first start investing and um I guess the the question is similar with copper uh are there any red Flags or things that you really got to be aware of in relation to either the style of mineralization um the style of the deposit the shape of the deposit or even uh the Metallurgy to some degree as well so uh you know you may get a discovery or a drill hole in a style of mineralization that looks really good it hits our requirements when it comes to the grade and um the percent meters and things like that but there's something with the mineralization which means we can't extract the copper or the style of the the occurrence of the copper uh is never going to be minable because of the shape or something like that you know uh refractory gold is a an example of I guess a problem that can occur with gold where the gold is so fine that you just need to add a significant additional processing step to be able to get it out which adds cost are there any sort of uh I guess things to be aware of like that when it comes to to Copper mineralization yeah sure and and this is a a big subject in itself but I think um if we look at the main sorts of things I if you're looking at Copper deposits um I like to look more at cure pure copper plays so they're very rare you know mostly copper does occur with something else copper Gold's fine it's easy to understand but you sometimes get these deposits that will have a copper equivalence like I was talking about it might be made up of Molly renum and a whole bunch of other exotic minerals that you may never have heard of but it all goes into the calculation copper equivalence so it's good to understand what they've you know how they've calculated that copper equivalence and often in those table ones they will tell you how they've done that but just know that every single different element in that copper equivalence may have a different recovery and it may have a different sort of processing style um to to get that Molly or renum out of of the mineralization so I like to look at pure copper PL or copper gold for instance that that that's the first thing um so the more the more the more poly metallic it is uh the more potential there is to I guess either add cost on the processing or lose value in the processing yeah that that's right um you know you often find copper associated with nickel magmatic nickel copper deposits and and nickel is well it's I know the price has come down a lot lately but it's still worth quite a bit more than copper I believe I think it's probably twice as much as as copper so I'm not so worried with nickel copper deposits they they're both in sulfides they have a very similar Pro processing pathway or Flo sheet and you produce a nickel concentrate and a copper concentrate that that's all that's all pretty easy it's it's more of these ones that you don't hear much of with the renum and aoly and other things that make up the value consideration for that mineralization look A couple of other examples um like you know I've got a couple of examples here one was where Native copper so native copper is basically just looks like your copper metal it's um it's formed in in nature in the oxide environment you get this native copper and copper as you know is very malleable sort of metal and if you throw that copper ore that's full of native copper into a crushing circuit and that crushing circuit might be made up of ball Mills that have those big metal ball bearings inside them banging around in a drum well the copper can clog up those that machinery and cause an absolute mess um in that processing environment and that's what happened with the the Rockland deposit some 10 10 years ago and caused all sorts of issues eventually that mine closed down and now it's owned by private owners so you need to um you need to understand your all processing flow sheet properly or otherwise can run into a lot of problems so I guess I guess if you're seeing an announcement and uh the company is um promoting how much Native copper they have in their deposit uh I mean that's great and because you would naturally just think oh wow it's basically pure copper it's native copy here but in reality uh too much of it could actually be a problem and you should start to think is this is this enough that it's going to be problematic for the processing yeah yes have they allowed for that in their processing stage have they flagged that as something that you know that they're working on and can can work around which they they can yeah now the other thing is um understanding the mineralogy of your copper deposit it's great I've found some copper mineralization I'm drilling it out I'm getting all these great copper copper results um but you know I might have things nasty things like arsenic or or fline mixed in with that copper mineralization which you can get penalties for when you produce that copper concentrate if that's got a lot of arenic in it or fline then smelters have to deal with that and you know you might get penalized and get less money for your copper concentrate so there's some other things that that um you know that's why it's important to get a pretty good handle on your mineraly early on in the process because there's certain minerals like an Ary and ten tenant type which has arsenic associated with it and that could flow through into to the concentrate so when you're looking at um probably when you're getting towards the res the resource stage as long as the the the companies have said look we've done some PR prelim preliminary sort of processing work we believe you know that we can come up with a clean concentrate and there's no red flags or or issues showing there yeah yeah so it's really really mostly to do with the the mineraly of the copper deposit which are the sort of the the main things that people I guess potentially become become unstuck on yeah there another example would be in the oxide copper so we're talking about the oxide copper which is this malachite azerite material now um a lot of that gets treated with acids solvents to to draw the copper out and then it goes into um an electro wining sort of process to to to pull the copper pull copper metal out of that now if you've got um a lot of carbonate gang material associated with that oxide mineralization the carbonate can act as a like a buffer against the acid that's used to dissolve the copper and that can add a lot of cost to your processing uh so you know as long as a company sort of flags that you know they don't have any M they've got low acid use which generally means low cost then that's a good thing it's high ass used and that's a bad thing yeah no I think that's a something that a lot of the rare earth listeners are quite familiar with at this point and often that can kind of lead to depending on what your grades are that the oxide zone of a mineral body may not be ecomic for example and it's only the deeper sort of sulfide Zone that that um that potentially Works what about um if I said to you I've got a lowgrade copper deposit here and I'm going to Heap Leach it um I mean Heap leaches are often uh I get a pro a way of mining which is commonly put forward as a a cheap memes uh but then you also sort of hear that they generally like the word on the street is they generally don't work as well as what they're put forward to is so are there any styles of mining or anything like that that might give you make you give you a little bit of concern yeah heat leaching again I'm not a metallurgist on a goo um but you know there's certain I think in theory it works really quite well in theory you're digging something up from your surface you're putting into a big pile you you're IR irrigating it with acid and it per circulates through it you collect the pregnant liquid and then you can actually make very high quality proper metal that you can sell to pretty well anyone like you're not create you're not creating a concentrate that needs to be then smelted into metal you creating a metal if you've got a what they call an sxcw plant so Electro winning plant um so there's plenty of operations around that work very profitably with that the the their high input cost the acid that I was talking about so carbonate can be an issue the other thing that can be an issue is when when you're obviously extracting the material and putting it into a mound they try to get a fairly even brain size so that the acid can percolate through it now if you have a lot of clay minerals and things in there then it'll plog things up and it makes the percolation very difficult and you have longer residence time for the acid to go through and and um you know so and that all adds to to cost so I think uh deposits that are not high in clay not high in carbonate that uh lend themselves more to this sort of uh heat Leach sort of situation yeah yeah that's fine so but there's no real style of of Min or mineralization that you would generally sort of avoid or just say oh no thank you it's all within the context yeah no all yeah all right listen um I think that's been overall I think we've done a pretty good you've provided us with a really good review of uh the different stes of mineralization and um grad soils red flags things like that um now we are well we we're doing a rare earth Focus here on the channel and we're going into a copper Focus we've taken a little bit of a Sidetrack into noi at the moment in the west arter region but um are there perhaps are there any companies that you you think would be good for us to do a review on on the channel for the listeners uh you can't pick Cooper minerals you can't pick your own company but um yeah do you think there's a a a good company you can think of that I can review that would be good value for the the Watchers and listeners yeah sure look uh copper discoveries are pretty far you know few and part between unfortunately and especially in Australia of Lake but one that I um I think is emerging that I think is really interesting is sort of going back to where copper was first discovered in Australia which was in South Australia and Capa right so that was discovered in the 1840s um by shepher looking for a lost sheep and he noticed that oxide mineralization at surface now Kanda had a huge copper mine for for many many years but there's been a company that's gone back there it's a private company but I think it might be becoming um public at some stage called Enviro copper but also Thor Thor energy is also got this deposit as well and they're looking at um insitu leech or insitu recovery of copper mineralization um so we know that you know we've had ISR in recovery of uranium deposits for for many years where they basically pump down a solvent into the Rock and they extract the uranium or in this case the copper and they bring that back to surface and they put it through an electro wining plant to get the copper copper metal so what these uh what they're doing at CAPA and also parts of the York Peninsula is they're looking at um environmentally friendly solvents so not acids but some sort of a other solvent that's environmentally friendly that they're developing with CSI and they they're pumping that down that's dissolving the copper and then they're extracting that out and I'll be able to produce some copper Metals so I think that's a really interesting space especially in you know this era of increased sustainability how do we go back to these old copper deposits and extract value out of them in an environmentally and sustainable way so yeah have a little virro copper FL energy on on that part as as you know that area of the ground is particularly sensitive environmentally and with the uh the land owners uh Ian and I have both worked down there and um can be a stressful time for sure so no that's excellent I really appreciate the um your time in um I think I got another one to okay so that's sort of in the you know let's look back at the old mines and how we can recover more copper out of it which I think is very important going forward and new discoveries this is probably more of a gold copper deposit that's okay War minerals in central New sou Wales okay so they've been drilling this spur Prospect uh which they believe is like a it's in the lock and F belt now that's home to um uh new mon Cadia deposit which is a huge huge por fre in the area the waro minerals have been hitting some highr gold and copper mineralization in what they think is in epithermal which might be the top part of this epithermal P Frey system so there could be a p Frey system below the high grade mineralization that they're hitting at the moment so I think warar minerals is is probably one to watch one of the hits that they got recently you know was 89 M at 1.7 G per ton gold and it had about .1% copper associated with it but there have got other intercepts with higher grades copper like up to three but with the goals it makes it really quite interesting so that's that's one to watch as well yeah I think I think we might take a look at warar um for sure because the Lan fold belt at the moment seems to be an area with a lot of uh renewed interest and um an area I'm looking at as well for some other projects so um that all comes together nicely so that's all awesome and fantastic and um once again thanks very much Ian now if people want to reach out and find you and ask you questions uh what's the best way for them to do that yeah they can go to the Cooper Metals website for sure you'll see an inquiries email there or look at one of the ASX announcements and you can get my email direct or or my phone number there happy to talk um more about copper more about Copa Metals for sure yeah yeah all right well I I'll also put uh your email in the description of the video below as well so there we go folks open invitation if you want to know more about copper and so forth you can uh email in directly alternatively if you want to get in contact with me uh check the details in the patreon below so uh that's it folks thanks very much for watching