Carolina Orozco Country Manager TORATA MINING (CHALLENGER GOLD)
Please can you introduce Torata Mining?
Torata Mining is the Ecuadorian subsidiary of Challenger Gold, an ASX-listed gold and copper exploration company. The company is developing the 9.1 million oz Au El Guayabo project in Ecuador, with ongoing resource expansion drilling in preparation for an updated MRE in 2026.
The concession had been operated artisanally by community members. Switching from a revenue-generating small-scale operation into an exploration area posed three inter-related challenges: First, replacing the existent income stream from artisanal mining with alternative sources; second, identifying the community’s actual needs; and third, explaining what we were doing and ensuring we were understood. How have you managed relationships with the local communities?
Rather than coming in as an outsider and deciding which projects to run, we created dialogue tables where we listened to diverse community representatives. The goal was to find solutions to real problems, problems that impacted the community rather than the individual. We created three associations: two are women-led and focus on cleaning and catering services, while the third provides mining services, such as environmental remediation.
Ian Harris President & CEO COPPER GIANT RESOURCES
How has the recent investment from Fiore Group propelled the Mocoa project forward?
The Mocoa copper project in Putumayo, Colombia, was discovered in the 1970s and passed through several different hands, including AngloGold Ashanti, Antofagasta, and B2Gold before we bought it in 2018. In November 2024, we launched a 14,000-m drill program. Results from the first diamond drill hole (MD-044) showed over 1,000 m of continuous mineralization.
A significant milestone for the project is to bring the (inferred) resource from the current 600 million t at 0.33% Cu grade to over 1 billion t. We will be putting out significant drilling results in the coming months to build towards the next resource update and then we will transition into project development work. What can you tell our readers about the business environment in Colombia?
The election of Colombia’s first left-leaning president (Gustavo Petro) in decades has sent shock waves to the outward market. The government is taking a hard line on fossil fuels, including oil and coal, but has called copper a strategic component of the country’s future reindustrialization.
Ian Graham President OROCO RESOURCE
What makes Santo Tomas particularly economic?
Based on our 2024 PEA and at a base metal price of Cu US$4/lb, Santo Tomas would need an initial Capex of US$1.1 bn and would yield US$1.48 bn post-tax NVP and a 22.2% post-tax IRR, with sharp sensitivity to copper prices. As a chalcopyrite resource (in proportion of over 98%), Santo Tomas has very straightforward mineralogy, the copper sulfide being easily recovered using a conventional floatation; initial metallurgical testing returned recoveries of over 85% using a simple grind and float circuit. Nature has given us an ore body that is well disposed to mining, making the project highly buildable. Considering Mexico’s regulatory uncertainty around open-pit mining, how are you moving forward with the project?
The project has recently been assured of direct support from the federal secretary of the economy and state governor thanks to political leadership from Mario Zamora, federal congressman for Sinaloa. This support has been highly publicized in Mexico, and we are moving forward by commencing our environmental baseline studies in preparation for EIA.