Pre-IPO gold exploration · Papua New Guinea & Queensland
Four gold systems, each prospective for the same reason it’s still available.
Epi Resources holds four exploration licenses for gold across two established provinces. In every case, historical explorers tested the wrong level with the wrong rationale, then walked away — not on the geology. None has ever had a hole test the gold window.
The portfolio
Four independent systems, ordered by the amount of historical exploration data.
From the most explored ground to the near blank slate. Each carries a mapped hydrothermal gold system, historical high-grade surface gold, and a set of modern satellite-spectral targets — and each was left before it was ever properly tested.
Kairiru
An active epithermal system — breached caldera, hot springs and a steaming coastal platform. Forty years of work almost all went to the eroded north flank; the preserved southern flank has never been drilled or soil-sampled.
Mt Donald
A potentially zoned porphyry-to-epithermal system around a Kennedy age diorite — associated with North Queensland’s ~40 Moz endowment of gold. Granted, road-accessible, and never tested by a diamond hole.
Tanga
A sealed, still-hot system on the arc that built Lihir (>80 Moz) and Simberi (~8 Moz). 1986 drilling only tested the barren cap; Boang — the largest neighbouring island, with the airstrip — has never been explored.
Mussau
A volcanic core sealed under a Pliocene reef. The last operator mapped a buried mineralised system, then left on the gold price. Not one hole and not one geophysical line has ever been completed here.
Grades are peak historical surface samples, not resources. † Tanga’s 1986 drilling maxed at 0.231 g/t through the barren cap; the gold window is untested. ‡ Mussau’s 28.1 g/t is a single float boulder among eight barren samples.
The investment thesis
The same pattern, four times over.
Each project was re-evaluated the same way — the historical exploration results and historical field data, the databases, the drill data and new satellite-spectral interpretation against one another for the first time. The same four findings recur, and together they explain both why the ground is prospective and why it’s still available.
Exploration tested the wrong horizons
Sampling and drilling concentrated on the eroded, capped or barren parts of each system — not the narrow boiling horizon where epithermal gold is deposited.
The pathfinder suite was never run
The elements that locate an explorer within a system — Sb, As, Hg, Te, Se, Tl, Ba, Mo — were assayed rarely or, in places, never in any systematic and useful data set.
The drilling was never a real test
Holes were shallow, mis-oriented, partly or wholly unassayed, or absent — and whole islands were never even held under tenement.
Abandoned on price, not geology
The PNG ground was relinquished when gold was under US$400/oz. At ~US$3,980/oz today, and with new technology and existing data to draw on, the cheap first test that was uneconomic then is worth doing now.
All four projects offer excellent prospectivity that previous explorers missed. Epi Resources has the experience, team and in-country expertise to advance them with a systematic approach, whilst managing geological risk.
Board & management
A team built to find gold — and to fund, permit and operate a mine.
Sinton Spence, MBE
Ken Crichton
