Kennecott Exploration Co. is drilling more exploratory holes in its effort to home in on a major copper deposit in Aitkin County.
The company has notified the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources that it will drill eight to 20 new holes starting Dec. 19 on land under which the state owns the mineral rights.
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Kennecott has the rights to explore for copper on the property after winning a DNR minerals lease bid.
The DNR said Tuesday that Kennecott expects to be finished with the test borings by April 1, before ground thaws. The company has agreements with various property owners to work on the lands.
The exploration project, about 50 miles west of Duluth near the tiny hamlet of Tamarack, has been underway for nearly 15 years, with millions of dollars spent, nearly 250 holes already drilled and miles of core samples studied.
Kennecott, a subsidiary of global mining giant Rio Tinto, has been looking for copper, nickel and other valuable metals in the Tamarack area for more than 15 years. The company is focusing on areas north and south of Minnesota Highway 210. All of the new drilling will be just north of the highway and west of the Carlton County line.
The company made a major finding of high-grade copper in 2008, but the global recession killed copper prices and virtually halted new exploration. In 2014, fledgling investment firm Talon Metals agreed to buy into the slow-moving Tamarack project, a sort of junior partner to infuse cash to help rekindle exploration.
Kennecott has identified a strip of copper-nickel-platinum group metal deposits deep underground and sprinkled across an area that's about 12 miles long and nearly 2 miles wide in some spots, although there isn't necessarily mineralization throughout that entire area. At least some of it is high-grade ore that would be valuable to mine - if and when copper prices recover from their current slump. Experts say that, unlike the Duluth Complex where PolyMet is hoping to mine copper, in which large amounts of lower-grade copper are present, the Tamarack area appears to have smaller amounts of very high-grade copper.
