Empire Metals (LON: EEE) is up 49% this morning on the announcement of a large copper and titanium find at Pitfield. As EEE says: “Confirmed the presence of a giant (~40km by 8km) metal-rich mineral system, hosted by sedimentary rocks displaying extensive evidence of intense alteration by hydrothermal fluids. These fluids are thought to be responsible for the significant enrichment of both copper (Cu) and titanium (Ti) in these sedimentary host rocks.” Most will concentrate upon that titanium and that's the wrong thing to look at.
Titanium's a perfectly respectable metal to go mining for but it's not all that valuable. We tend to think of titanium metal, which is, but that's because the metal is difficult and energy intensive to make from the oxide. The oxide is worth hundreds of $ per tonne - which is why we can afford for the major global usage to be the white in white paint. There are plenty of places - usually mineral sands operations - that it's possible to get ilmenite, rutile and so on from which titanium can be extracted. We could, if we like, therefore value Empire Metals as if it has just found a mineral sands deposit. Which would be nice but isn't, actually, all that terribly exciting.
Empire Metals share price from London Stock Exchange
It's the other part there that is the interesting thing. Now, this explanation is wrong in every specific and particular but it's a good story to understand it. One way to think about metals deposits is that boring sedimentary rock doesn't have much interesting in there. But sometimes volcanic rock seeps up through - not quite exploding as a volcano, a deep underground pimple instead. But as that magma seeps and cools the different metals in it coalesce out at different points. So, you can have a line of mineral deposits as in the Krusny Hory, where at the SW end it's mostly tin, at the NE end mostly tungsten, in the middle tin and tungsten. You know, sort of, don't take this as being accurate - but First Tin is mining tin in the SE, European Metals tin, tungsten and lithium in the middle of the Krusny Hory today.
What Empire is saying that it's found is evidence of one of these seeps of magma up through the sedimentary rock. And the fun thing will be to see where all the varied possible metals contained in the magma will have coalesced out. There could be all sorts of things in there. The copper and titanium detailed so far. Maybe silver, tungsten, tin, all sorts of things could be in different parts of that “metal-rich mineral system”.
One of the things that makes the above explanation wrong is that they're saying “hydrothermal” which means water (“of or relating to hot water, used especially of the formation of minerals by hot solutions rising from a cooling magma”), not magma. But the base mental image still works. The next stage is going to be a lot of work researching what is where there. This is, thus, very early days as yet.