Pan Asia Metals has fired the copper exploration starting gun in northern Chile by triggering the conversion of an exclusivity agreement into a binding option to buy the promising Rosario copper project – which sits close to Enami’s giant El Salvador mine.

Management has agreed to pay an annual fee of US$100,000 (AU$154,000) for the three-year option, with 50 per cent to be paid via shares at the company’s election. The deal also includes the option for Pan Asia to pay a US$2 million (AU$3.1 million) final purchase fee at any time, again with 50 per cent payable in shares at the company’s election.

The four exploitation and nine exploration contiguous concessions at Rosario span 24 square kilometres and consist of three distinct prospective trends with a combined strike length of 15km.

‘The Rosario Copper Project ticks all PAM’s boxes.’

Pan Asia Metals managing director Paul Lock

The company has interpreted the underexplored project as a Manto-style copper-silver opportunity – a highly-prospective mineralisation type responsible for several 200 million tonne-plus discoveries grading more than 1 per cent copper throughout the northern parts of Chile, including the Mantos Blancos, El Solado and Michilla mines.

Pan Asia Metals managing director Paul Lock said: “The Rosario Copper Project ticks all PAM’s boxes – it is located in an infrastructure-rich setting, it has potential processing solutions located between Rosario and the nearest port, it demonstrates peer group-leading copper grades from a significant suite of rock chips samples and it is located in a premier copper-producing region known for its cost advantages. In essence, the Project has what is needed to gain a position in the lower third of the cost curve.”

To date, historical data at Rosario consists of 89 rock chip samples collected from small prospector workings and outcrops. Of those, 73 samples returned values greater than 0.1 per cent copper, with an average of 2.23 per cent and running as high as 5 per cent copper and 6.4 grams per tonne of silver.

Sitting within Chile’s Central Copper Belt, one of the country’s premier copper-producing areas and 120km east of Chanaral port in the Atacama region, the project area is just 10km north of the State-owned El Salvador mine that hosts 800 million tonnes of ore grading 0.59 per cent copper for a total of 4.7 million tonnes of contained copper.

El Salvador is a porphyry-style deposit, with mineralisation intruding through the same rocks that host the Rosario project. Some minor intrusives have been mapped on Pan Asia’s grounds, but according to the company there is still plenty of potential for “blind” porphyry copper targets beneath the surface.