Larvotto Resources will take on the historical Blockade copper mine northeast of Mount Isa, after drilling beneath the old open pit hit 31m at 1.16 per cent copper from 63m.

The company put eight reverse circulation (RC) holes into the deposit to check the historical results stacked up before going ahead with the deal, which gives it the exclusive right to explore, develop and mine Blockade under an option agreement with Kilo Copper Pty Ltd.

Blockade sits on a granted mining lease surrounded by Larvotto’s existing Queensland tenements and was previously mined for high-grade copper by Mount Isa Mines.

“Blockade is a cornerstone development for our wider Mt Isa copper strategy; a granted mining lease with a history of production, high-grade mineralisation confirmed to be open along strike and down dip, sitting squarely within our existing tenure,” Larvotto Resources managing director Ron Heeks said.

“Larvotto now has a proven record to advance projects quickly towards development as we have done with Hillgrove, and we hope to replicate this at Blockade.”

Hillgrove is Larvotto’s antimony-gold project in New South Wales. Because the Blockade lease is already granted, the company can get on with mining plans rather than spending years in approvals, and it sees the mine anchoring a regional hub-and-spoke copper operation near Glencore’s Mt Isa smelter.

The 1330m program showed the mineralisation stays open at depth and along the plunge of the deposit, with the deepest hole reaching 244m and grades running as high as 4.08 per cent copper with elevated cobalt.

The deal is cheap to get into. Larvotto will hand Kilo Copper $400,000 in shares, can buy the mining lease outright for $1 million in cash, shares or a mix, and only owes a further payment – capped at $10 million – if the mine actually produces ore.

Drilling to define a resource starts in the September quarter of 2026, ahead of a maiden mineral resource estimate and a scoping study looking at how ore could be processed and hauled using Mt Isa’s existing infrastructure.

“With our due diligence drilling having confirmed broad, continuous mineralisation to depth which delivered strong copper grades our focus now is to proceed to resource definition and to understand the full scale of what we have at Blockade.”

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