MAN appoints specialist contractor - Drilling in Q3-2023
Our US based lithium Investment Mandrake Resources (ASX: MAN) is putting together its exploration team for its upcoming drill program.
MAN just appointed “Vanoco” - a US based company that predominantly services the oil and gas sector with project management, engineering and field supervision.
Vanoco’s experience in the oil and gas sector is important given MAN is looking to re-enter historic oil and gas wells when it starts its drill program later this year.
Interestingly Vanoco was recently involved in a similar project in Canada where the company helped run some lithium brine sampling programs.
MAN also confirmed that the company had received multiple bids from drilling contractors and expected to get these deals signed soon.
Background on MAN’s upcoming drill program:
In its upcoming drill program MAN won't be drilling new wells, instead MAN will be looking to re-enter old oil and gas wells and sample for lithium brines.
Re-entry is ~10x cheaper than drilling new wells so the approach makes sense.
MAN has a minimum of six wells it is considering re-entering (ranked based on geological potential and ease of accessibility).
Ultimately MAN is looking to emulate the success of its much larger capped lithium brine neighbour Anson Resources.
Anson has a mineral resource estimate of ~1mt LCE (Lithium Carbonate Equivalent and put the resource together by resampling old oil and gas wells - the same strategy MAN is deploying.
Ultimately, the target for MAN is to sample its wells and then define a resource of its own.
MAN is trading with a market cap of $25M.
This compares to Anson’s market cap which is ~$227M - ~9x bigger than MAN.
What’s next for MAN?
Maiden exploration target 🔄
We are looking forward to MAN putting out an exploration target for its project.
Lithium sampling program 🔄
Once the exploration target is confirmed, it will be all about progressing the work needed to convert that exploration target into a maiden JORC resource estimate (e.g. sampling existing wells and potentially drilling a new well).
