White Cliff uncovers copper depth below Bornite Hills surface high grades

Bornite Hills drilling connects surface copper to depth

White Cliff Minerals Limited (ASX:WCN) has put a substantial underground extension beneath Bornite Hills, reporting 11.5 metres at 2.00% copper from 75.5 metres in hole BNH26003 and 15.0 metres at 1.62% copper from 57 metres in BNH26001A. The strongest individual result was a 0.56-metre interval grading 16.3% copper in BNH26003.

Those intersections sit more than 60 metres below a historic surface trench that returned 3.66 metres at 46.99% copper. The company says the drilling confirms that the massive bornite seen at surface continues into the subsurface, although the comparison is between a surface trench sample and downhole intersections rather than equivalent mining widths.

A 1.3km target remains largely untested

The mineralisation occurs in a quartz-carbonate-copper sulphide vein and breccia system running along a structure that can be traced for more than 1.3 kilometres. It lies immediately west of the Herb Dixon Fault Zone, a regional structure already associated with copper mineralisation, including a 2025 intersection of 3.5 metres at 7.2% copper within 12 metres at 2.45% copper at the Stark target.

Bornite Hills is now the latest addition to an increasingly crowded Rae exploration program. White Cliff has been advancing Danvers toward resource-definition work, with the recent Danvers depth extension also adding to the project’s growing copper narrative. The company’s regional campaign has financial backing from a proposed A$8.77 million placement to Hancock Prospecting, which shareholders approved earlier in October and which was intended to fund Danvers and broader Rae drilling.

Early holes reveal both promise and uncertainty

The first-pass program was far from uniformly successful. BNH26001 was drilled too steeply and missed the target structure, while BNH26002 was abandoned at 15 metres. A replacement hole, BNH26002A, drilled more than 700 metres to the south-southeast, intersected only a minor mineralised structure at depth. BNH26003 was drilled obliquely to BNH26001A to help establish the orientation of the host structure.

White Cliff interprets the main structure as dipping steeply westward, but says more drilling is needed to identify the controls on the highest-grade zones. All reported Bornite Hills intervals are drilled widths, not true thicknesses, and the release does not establish grade continuity, a mineral resource or an exploration target.

Survey data to guide the 2027 drilling pipeline

The company is using a high-resolution airborne magnetic, gravity and radiometric survey to refine targets across the Rae Group-Husky Creek Formation contact and the parallel structures around Bornite Hills. The survey covers an extensive 70-kilometre strike length and is expected to feed into target generation in early 2027.

Follow-up drilling is planned along the Bornite Hills structure and its parallel zones, alongside testing of other undrilled volcanic-package targets including Thor, Rocket and Vision. The immediate question is whether the first two meaningful intersections represent a coherent high-grade system or isolated shoots within a much larger, more variable structure.