Collective to expand 2025 Colombia drill program

Canadian explorer Collective Mining (TSX, NYSE: CNL) said it will expand drilling in Colombia this year while speeding up various studies in a bid to secure permits faster.

The revised program, covering 70,000 metres instead of 60,000 metres, will be the largest in company history, and include as many as 10 diamond drill rigs – instead of six – in operation across the Guayabales and San Antonio projects, Toronto-based Collective said Wednesday in a statement. Collective will also accelerate baseline environmental, hydrological and metallurgical studies.

Led by Continental Gold’s former management team, which discovered and built Colombia’s largest gold mine before being acquired by China’s Zijin Mining Group for C$1.4 billion ($980 million) in 2020, Collective is focusing exploration efforts on large-scale copper-gold porphyry systems in the South American country. Its flagship Guayabales project is located about 80 km south of Medellin, near Aris Mining’s (TSX: ARIS; NYSE: ARMN) Marmato gold mine. Guayabales hosts a total of 13 exploration targets, of which the Apollo system is the most advanced.

“We view the announcement as positive for Collective shares given the company’s strong cash balance positions it well for the expanded drill program,” Scotia Capital mining analyst Ovais Habib said Wednesday in a note. “The additional drill rigs and metres budgeted in the latest program should support the grade and continuity of the Apollo system particularly where existing drill spacing is widest, plus test high-grade targets at depths of more than 1,000 metres.”

Collective shares rose 2.1% to $12.69 Wednesday morning in Toronto. That gives the company a market capitalization of about C$1 billion.

Fully funded

With about $78 million in the bank, Collective is more than fully funded for the enlarged drill program after securing a $63.4 million investment from Agnico Eagle Mines (TSX, NYSE: AEM) last month in a share offering and warrants deal.

Apollo, which anchors Guayabales, hosts high-grade gold-silver-copper-tungsten deposits. Collective said it’s looking to improve Apollo’s overall grade by systematically drill testing newly modeled potentially high-grade sub-zones. It’s also working to expand the newly discovered high-grade Ramp Zone, enlarge the Trap system and drill a series of newly generated targets including Tower and X. 

Under the revised 2025 program, Collective plans to have up to seven rigs drilling Apollo to test the Ramp Zone and high-grade sub-zones, up to two rigs testing the Tower, ME, X, and Trap targets and another rig drilling at San Antonio.

Apollo, “which is the most important discovery to date within the company’s Guayabales project, has emerged as an important large-scale, bulk tonnage, and high-grade system generated from grassroots exploration,” Ari Sussman, Collective’s executive chairman, said in the statement. “The emergence of Apollo occurs at a time when there is a dearth of new and impactful exploration discoveries within our industry. We continue to believe that Apollo is the tip of the iceberg within the Guayabales project and that further discoveries will come with aggressive drilling and perseverance.”