WCB Resources has been successful in an application for an area of Papua New Guinea that is prospective for porphyry copper-gold. The exploration licence is 170km northwest of Port Moresby in the Mt Yule region and covers the historic region comprising the Ipi River Prospect.

Project generation activities have highlighted the Mt Yule region as a target area with the Ipi River Prospect being the most advanced project defined to date.

This region was originally defined in the 1970s by high order copper steam sediment geochemistry completed at the time of the OK Tedi discovery. Ipi River is a large relatively untested porphyry copper-gold-molybdenum system with significant peripheral base metal and epithermal vein style mineralisation defined over a large region.

Central to the project is a large hydrothermal breccia complex that has highly elevated gold results in soil data. Historic drilling in the peripheral zone of the porphyry by BHP in the early 1970s returned results of 0.1% to 0.2% copper. High grade copper, gold and molybdenum results have been previously returned in rock chip data.

A second high order copper anomaly is defined to the north in the Kunimaipa River but no work has been completed here previously on this area of large lithocap.

WCB president and CEO Cameron Switzer said, “The Mt Yule ELA covers an exciting target area within which two porphyry copper-gold-molybdenum centres can be discerned covering a large surface area.

“Moving forward the strategy is to evaluate the targets through systematic exploration including detailed historic activity searches, soil sampling and trenching. The exciting component here is that for the size and tenor of the system, the amount of previous exploration activity is minimal.

“The project compliments our Misima Island Gold Project which has indicated and inferred resources of 1.7 million ounces of gold.”