Pearl Copper Project
The Pearl Copper Project (“Pearl” and/or the “Project”) is situated in the San Manuel mining district, Pinal County, Arizona, approximately 40km north-east of Tucson, near the town of Mammoth.
Arizona is a Tier 1 mining jurisdiction, and the USA’s top copper producing state. It is also an established and attractive mining jurisdiction, ranking No. 7 in 2023’s Investment Attractiveness Index by the Fraser Institute. It is supported by world class infrastructure which includes sealed roads, railways and mains power transmission lines, with access to a highly skilled workforce.
Pearl lies within the world-class Laramide Porphyry Copper Province, within the prolific Southwestern North American Porphyry Copper Province. This is the principal copper metallogenic province of the USA, accounting for approximately 70% of total USA copper production in 2023.
Despite prolific evidence of surface mineralisation and its location being immediately north of BHP’s San Manuel-Kalamazoo Mine, one of the largest deposits in the Laramide Porphyry Copper Province, the Project has been subject to minimal modern exploration and has never been drilled.
Initial field reconnaissance identified two advanced targets which remain undrilled despite showing all the surface characteristics of major mineralised systems. The Odyssey and Ford targets present Golden Mile with a fast-tracked opportunity to make a significant copper discovery.
The most significant working within the Project area are the Pearl and Ford Mines. The Pearl Mine is located on the north-western portion of the Project within the Odyssey Prospect. It produced up to 60,000 tons of ore containing copper oxide and sulphide, lead, silver and gold from largely artisanal workings from 1915 to 1941 (Force, 1997).
Historical records from the Ford Mine, located within the Pearl Copper Project mine claims have reported Lead assays from 5.7% to 31.3%, copper assays from 5.8% to 10.6% and that gold increases in the deeper levels from 0.01 oz to 0.54 oz (16.7g/t) (Baird, 1942).
Significant upside from organic exploration exists given Pearl’s geographic location, situated in the heart of the world-class Laramide Porphyry Copper Belt and 1 km of the San Manuel Mine (historic production of 4.7 Mt) that has been operating for 44 years.
