Canadian company to expand copper exploration near Ekibastuz with new wells in 2025
Canadian Arras Minerals plans to begin active drilling in the first half of 2025, aiming to discover copper and gold at deposits in the Pavlodar region, according to the company’s press service.
Arras Minerals conducted extensive geological exploration in 2024 across a 1,700-square-kilometer area close to its Beskauga, Elemes, and Tay projects, located near Ekibastuz. The company drilled 435 holes and collected 35,000 soil samples. Based on the field research, Arras Minerals identified prospecting sites for drilling, with plans to begin in 2025, as revealed in its press release.
«It’s exciting to witness the significant progress made by the Arras-Teck Exploration Alliance in understanding this prospective and under-explored belt. We anticipate commencing drill-testing of several high-priority copper targets, currently undrilled and under shallow cover, in the first half of 2025,» Arras Minerals CEO Tim Barry said.
Two sites were under exploration. One covers an area of 1,300 square kilometers and lies 56 kilometers northwest of Ekibastuz, including the Bozshakol mine owned by Kaz Minerals. The second site is located 90 kilometers southeast of Ekibastuz and is divided into the Akkuduk and Norgubek projects.
Arras Minerals holds the third-largest license package for copper and gold extraction in Kazakhstan, following Rio Tinto and Fortescue. In December 2023, the company signed an agreement with another Canadian enterprise, Teck Resources Limited (TRL), under which TRL will allocate $5 million for geological exploration by Arras Minerals between 2024 and 2025. Additionally, Teck Resources holds a 10% stake in the Beskauga project.
In late September, Arras Minerals President Darren Klinck confessed in an interview with the Kitco Mining media outlet at the 2024 Precious Metals Summit Beaver Creek in Colorado that he knew very little about Kazakhstan three years ago, but now, based on his 20 years of experience, he considers the country one of the easiest places to do business.
«It’s truly a nation that, even in the last five or six years, has gone through immense change. They’ve done things in terms of reforms across all aspects of business, but when it comes to mining, they effectively copied the Western Australian mining code, threw in a few of the good things out of Ontario and Quebec, and now you’ve got the major mining companies starting to arrive. So, it’s been nothing, but I think positive surprises all along the way, and from a jurisdiction perspective, probably one of the easier places to operate that I’ve worked in over the last 20 years,» Klinck stated.
