A tunnel inside FireFly Metals’ Ming underground mine. Credit: Blair McBride
BAIE VERTE, N.L. – Hundreds of metres underground inside a tunnel in northwest Newfoundland, and illuminated only by head lamps, is the precise area where FireFly Metals’ (ASX, TSX: FFM) exploration started in the Ming mine.
The tunnel is part of a 10-km network of underground infrastructure that goes down more than 1 km, where FireFly is drilling for copper and gold. The site, including the Little Deer deposit 40 km away, is part of FireFly’s Green Bay project, near the town of Baie Verte, 600 km northwest of St. John’s.
“This is the 805 Exploration Drive,” FireFly CEO Darren Cooke said last month while standing in front of a rock face that sparkles with copper and gold mineralization. “This is really important to us because this really does mark the start of where we took over this operation.”
Watch a video of the site visit
Perth-headquartered FireFly inherited the site in October 2023 when it acquired Rambler Metals and Mining, which had entered creditor protection earlier that year. It has since launched an ambitious drilling and development push – buoyed by an $84.8-million financing in early June – which is revealing Ming as one of the highest grade pre-development copper projects in Canada.
Green Bay, which is mostly the Ming deposit, hosts 24.4 million measured and indicated tonnes at 1.7% copper, 0.3 gram gold per tonne and 2.5 grams silver for 400,000 tonnes copper, 199,000 oz. gold and 2 million oz. silver, according to an initial resource from last October. The inferred resource totals 34.5 million tonnes at 1.7% copper, 0.3 gram gold and 3.1 grams silver for 600,000 tonnes copper, 348,000 oz. gold and 3.4 million oz. silver.
Shares in FireFly, which launched on the Toronto Stock Exchange last December, traded for 94¢ apiece at press time, for a market capitalization of A$652.7 million (C$583 million). The stock has traded in a 12-month range of 59¢ to $1.03.
Underground expansion
FireFly made its 805 drift, starting at 950 metres down the ramp and extending 1 km horizontally, to enable more exploration and drilling. Drilling there helped add 20 million tonnes to the 40 million-tonne resource FireFly picked up from Rambler when it took the asset over Green Bay.
Six rigs are drilling, focused on infill and extension, part of a 130,000-metre program. Results from below 1,500 metres depth are to be incorporated into a resource update in October.
Further down the 805 tunnel, a drill rig stands beside trays of cores. Their glinting surfaces suggest some of the high grades that FireFly has intersected this year. Highlight holes include:
MUG24-114, that cut 19 metres grading 2.9% copper and 1 gram gold from 225 metres depth; MUG24-125 that intersected 14.2 metres at 5.7% copper and 2 grams gold from 184.4 metres; and MUG24-102 which cut 14.5 metres grading 3.4% copper and 1.3 grams gold from 190.5 metres depth.
Canada’s #1 copper
Those intersections hint at the strength of Ming’s copper resource, which would rank as Canada’s highest grade copper deposit. It’s ahead of Foran Mining’s (TSX: FOM) McIlvenna Bay project in Saskatchewan, which hosts 29.7 million probable reserve tonnes grading 1.21% copper.
Even though Foran’s market cap is almost $700 million higher than FireFly’s, Cooke said he’s not convinced there’s the same valuation difference between the companies’ ore bodies.
“That’s where the value for investors lies,” he said. “As we get our studies up and running, there’s going to be a serious re-rate in this stock, and we will bridge that gap to the valuations with Foran.”
On-site mill
As FireFly looks towards its resource update in the fall, a preliminary economic assessment or pre-feasibility study in November or December, and a feasibility study next year, management remembers a lesson it learned from the demise of Rambler.
FireFly plans to build a new mill on the site so it doesn’t have to transport ore 40 km away to a mill – the kind of situation that drove up haulage costs for Rambler, Cooke said.
Also, a deposit as large as Green Bay demands a mill with higher capacity than the annual throughput of up to 500,000 tonnes that Rambler had at its Nugget Pond mill.
“The bigger the throughput, the lower the unit costs, the more money that gets made,” Cooke said. “Our current resource is 60 million tonnes [and] it would take 120 years to process through that little mill that’s 40 km away.”
Amid the rising global interest in copper as an essential component in green energy technologies, Cooke says he believes Ming is a strong candidate to help meet that demand.
“We’re seeing countries scramble to get their hands on high-quality concentrate,” he said. “There just are not many opportunities out there that can be brought online, quickly and at a reasonable scale. Copper is going to be in hot demand by the time we start producing concentrate in a few years’ time.”
