Location

The Walton Project is located in the under-explored Yerilgee greenstone belt, which is part of the Southern Cross domain, and is 475km from Perth.

Empire entered into an agreement to acquire a 70% interest over the project from Century Minerals Pt y Ltd in April 2022.

Geology Setting

The Yerilgee belt comprises a sequence of high-magnesium basalts, ultramafic volcanic rocks, sedimentary rocks and granites including iron formations. It is part of the 2.9 Ga Western Yilgarn greenstone succession that hosts the world-class Golden Grove VHMS system, and a number of other emerging VHMS prospects such as Cobre Ltd’s Perrinvale Project and Arrow Minerals Strickland Project.

Exploration and Mining Activities

There has been recent exploration success in the region, as seen at Spectrum Metals’ high-grade Penny North discovery which led to a takeover of Spectrum Metals by Ramelius Resources in 2020. Ramelius Resources is mining the Marda gold operation in the greenstone belt immediately to the west of Yerilgee.

Cobre’s drilling at the Schwabe Prospect at Perrinvale, which lies to the north of Walton, intersected massive sulphide mineralisation at shallow depth, including 6m grading 8.93% copper, 3.1 g/t gold, 3.52% zinc, 30 g/t silver and 0.14% cobalt. In addition to VHMS, there is potential for orogenic gold associated with major belt parallel shear zones and lithium-bearing pegmatites which are common in the higher metamorphic grade terrains of the Yilgarn craton.

Minimal exploration activities have been undertaken on the Walton licence area and it is Empire’s plan to initially carry out field geological mapping, including surface soils/auger sampling, geochemical mapping and potentially additional geophysics to help identify copper, gold and lithium targets.