QMines to revive Mt Chalmers copper-gold mine with planned ASX listing

Junior resources company QMines is seeking to raise a minimum of $10 million in an upcoming IPO, with proceeds to fund the revival of its wholly-owned historic Mt Chalmers copper-gold mine 17km from Rockhampton in Queensland.

The IPO follows a “strongly oversubscribed” seed capital raising that was completed late last year.

After setting out to raise $1.5 million, the seed capital raising brought in $2.2 million with investors including “a number of notable sophisticated and institutional investors”.

IPO to raise $10m

QMines has lodged its prospectus with the Australian Securities and Investment Commission and the IPO was launched today.

At this stage, QMines is eyeing a listing date of 21 April.

In its IPO, QMines is seeking to raise up to $20 million, with a minimum subscription of $10 million.

Under the maximum subscription, QMines will issue 66.66 million shares at $0.30 each and have a post-listing market capitalisation of approximately $41.6 million.

Leading QMines is an experienced team, which recently sold the former Alt Resources (ASX: ARS) and its historic Bottle Creek gold mine in Western Australia to a private equity group at a significant premium.

In just two years, the Alt team had increased its global resources in the region to just under 600,000oz of gold and 4.5 million ounces of silver and completed a pre-feasibility study on developing a stand-alone operation at Bottle Creek.

Mt Chalmers comes with rich database

Through QMines, the former Alt team is bringing to the market a suite of brownfield assets with the aim of becoming Queensland’s next copper and gold developer.

Of note, is the historic gold-copper-silver Mt Chalmers mine project near Rockhampton, Queensland.

Mt Chalmers was mined sporadically between 1898 and 1982 and, in total, produced 1.24Mt at 2% copper, 3.6 grams per tonne gold and 19g/t silver.

It has an existing JORC inferred resource of 3.9Mt at 1.15% copper, 0.81g/t gold and 8.4g/t silver for a contained 44,900t of copper, 101,900oz of gold and 1.06Moz of silver.

QMines pointed out the project has significant sunk capital including a large historic drill database that provides further resource growth potential. That database covers 591 holes for a total of 48,786m of drilling.

Additionally, QMines says the Mt Chalmers resource remains open in all directions, and there are three exploration targets that have been drilled and modelled with resource growth potential.

Silverwood, Warroo and Herries Range projects

As well as Mt Chalmers, QMines has a 100% interest in Silverwood, Warroo and Herries Range, which are southeast of Brisbane.

Similar to Mt Chalmers, Warroo has hosted historic copper and gold mining. The project covers 216sq km of ground which includes the old Warroo gold mine that operated between 1910 and 1913, producing 1,206oz of gold, 21t of copper and 901oz of silver.

QMines’ expects there is potential to locate unmined primary mineralisation beneath the pit floor.

The IPO opened today following the conclusion of the exposure period with ASIC.