Happy Friday, Apes!
Pour the last double-double of the week: a district-scale Arizona copper project just put a number on the table, 18 billion pounds, and an Uzbek gas producer proved a multi-well drilling program can actually hit its marks.
On the rock side, a hydrometallurgy startup partners up on a new mine-to-metal pathway, and a Manitoba gold junior's insiders buy into their own financing two weeks after the drill bit did the hard part.
On the patch side, a Permian driller bolts on six more rigs, and a directional specialist gets board approval for a buyback it apparently has no plans to use.
Let's dig in.
🥇 Gold (spot): $4,390/oz 📈
🥈 Silver (spot): $65.49/oz 📈
🔌 Copper: $6.60/lb 📈
☢️ Uranium (U₃O₈ spot): $87.25/lb 📈
🛢️ WTI Crude: $81.93/bbl 📈
🔥 Natural Gas (Henry Hub): $2.73/MMBtu 📉
🍁 TSX-V Composite: 970.17 📈
💵 U.S. Dollar (DXY): 99.90 📉
The Motherlode: A District-Scale Arizona Copper Play Sets Its Sights on 18 Billion Pounds
What happened: Faraday Copper $$CPPKF ( ▼ 3.37% ) just told The Northern Miner it expects confirmation drilling at BHP's former San Manuel mine in Arizona to support a combined resource of more than 18 billion pounds of copper, once San Manuel and its neighbouring Copper Creek project get merged into one district.
The underlying deal, BHP effectively taking a 30% stake in exchange for handing over San Manuel, closes this month.
Faraday plans at least 23,000 metres of drilling starting in the fourth quarter, with a combined resource estimate targeted for mid-2027.
Why it happened: San Manuel processed about 800 million tonnes at 0.66% copper between 1955 and 1999, more than 4.5 million tonnes of copper total, but BHP discarded the old core data, so none of that history counts toward a modern resource until Faraday redrills it.
Copper Creek already carries 421.9 million tonnes at 0.45% copper measured and indicated (4.2 billion pounds) plus 83.6 million tonnes at 0.34% inferred (628 million pounds) from a 2023 PEA, so the 18 billion pound target has real rock underneath it, not just a press-release headline.
What it means for your position: shares have more than quadrupled over the past year to $5.50, and the company is sitting on $126.2 million in cash and term deposits, enough to fund the drilling into early 2028 without a dilutive raise.
A BHP stake plus an 18% position from the Lundin family trusts is about as credible a cap table as junior copper gets, and it's landing squarely inside a live copper squeeze that's had this newsletter's Dashboard glowing green for a week straight.
Worth watching whether the resource number holds up once assays start coming back: 18 billion pounds is still a target, not a line in a technical report yet.
Drill Bit Tech & Trends: A Hydromet Startup Pitches a New Mine-to-Metal Pathway
RZOLV Technologies $$RZOLF ( ▼ 5.04% ) signed a strategic memorandum of understanding with Novamera to pair Novamera's Surgical Mining platform, precision drilling and subsurface guidance built for selective, low-dilution extraction, with RZOLV's proprietary water-based, non-cyanide hydrometallurgical leaching chemistry.
The pitch: a modular, capital-light mine-to-metal pathway that could make narrow-vein, high-grade, brownfield deposits pencil out even when a conventional mine-and-mill build doesn't.
The first deliverable is a joint technical evaluation protocol covering desktop screening, leach optimization and downstream recovery.
So what: pairing selective extraction with non-cyanide processing is a genuinely interesting stack if it works, unlocking stranded deposits too small or remote for a traditional mill.
Skeptic's footnote: this is a non-binding MOU, not a signed deal, and it's RZOLV's third headline tie-up in three weeks (DTC eligibility, a biosciences collaboration, now this) for a pre-revenue, thinly traded microcap.
Read the "potential commercial structures" language: paid testwork, licensing, royalties, as exactly that: potential, not booked.