The ideal recipe for a highly refined drilling campaign has been concocted and is now being executed at Noronex’s (ASX: NRX) flagship Alaskan Sleitat tin, tungsten and silver project. High-resolution airborne magnetic and radiometric geophysics and a targeted field exploration program are underway, while historic drill core will soon be sent away to be assayed for tungsten, as the company gears up to release a JORC Exploration Target that will quantify the likely massive scale of the project with high confidence data, in the lead up to a drilling campaign that will test these key growth prospects and build on the numerous historical assays intersected at the project such as 29.1m at 1.56% Sn and 28g/t Ag from 20.4m including 3.1m at 12.55% Sn and 198g/t Ag from 20.4m. Tin traded above US$56k/t since our initiation at US$52k/t a month ago, and is still holding at US$55k/t, as Fastmarkets released new research that quantifies the increased AI-driven demand profile of tin, with forecast deficits of 9,000t in 2026 and 8,000t in 2027 likely to continue driving high prices. Concurrently, $20 million earn-in partner South32 (ASX: S32) is funding a 2,500m drilling campaign at NRX’s copper portfolio in Namibia, which will follow up on assays such as 45m at 0.80% Cu and 23g/t Ag from 144m, including 13m at 1.50% Cu and 45g/t Ag from 150m – and could yield a big reaction from the market after Kaoko Metals (ASX: KAO) jumped 151% yesterday to close at $112 million market cap, off the back of the first two holes at its maiden drilling at a greenfields Namibian project hit 60.25m and 51.83m of visible copper mineralisation, respectively.
In 2017, the USGS deemed Sleitat as one of only two American tin deposits likely to be economic, which built on the extensive historical exploration that led to the USBM delineating an inferred resource of 25.9Mt grading between 0.224% and 0.37% Sn, along with 0.04% W and 17g/t Ag. We want to see the upcoming JORC exploration target outline something similar to this, to further bolster the comparison of $9 million market cap NRX to $184 million Sky Metals (ASX: SKY) and its Tallebung project in NSW, which contains a deposit grading 32.7Mt at 0.11% Sn, 0.035% WO3 and 9.5g/t Ag (0.16% SnEq).
The 250 line-km of helicopter-borne magnetics and radiometrics across Sleitat has been done with 50m line spacing, a drastic improvement on the one-mile spacing used for historical government geophysical surveys. The significantly improved resolution will map the central muscovite-granite intrusion, granite-hornfels contact and structures associated with greisen mineralisation, with results expected within one month. NRX’s eight-day field campaign will sample the drilled northern greisen, its north-eastern continuation, the undrilled southern greisen and the eastern roof-zone target interpreted beneath hornfels around the granite margin. NRX will also re-log 1,400m of historical core at the Alaska Geologic Materials Center in Anchorage to refine lithology, alteration and mineralised contacts – and after testing the core on site with the XRF gun for tungsten – will send select core away for reassaying. All of these datasets will be integrated into a three-dimensional geological model supporting drill target ranking, a maiden JORC Exploration Target in Q4 2026 and drill planning for next field season.
There are many more impressive assays from Sleitat aside from the extraordinary hole that drilled right through the high-grade core, such as 47.9m at 0.40% Sn including 9.45m at 2.99% Sn, 124g/t Ag from 3m, 19.8m at 0.71% Sn from 3m, 23.47m at 0.36% Sn from 36.6m and 6.1m at 0.8% Sn and 25g/t Ag from surface. The exploration target will be a high confidence formulation that is based on historical drilling combined with current geophysics and sampling, as opposed to the historical resource which was estimated with mapped surface area of greisen zones, a 152m depth projection, a tonnage factor of 12ft3/st (2.67t/m3), and a mineralised greisen proportion of 48.6% of total rock derived from 650 samples. The previously drilled northern greisen is 900m x 300m while the undrilled southern is 400m x 250m, and the current program will significantly refine how much of this area could contain an economic resource – with all indicators so far appearing to validate the historical USBM resource.
Tin is one of the most exciting commodities to be investing in right now – and its attractive supply and demand dynamics are continuing to immediately flow through to its trading, with price action throughout August being particularly exciting given the progressively better visibility on very near term supply – which will still remain in a deficit. The base metal finished at US$55,530/t on 7 August, rose to US$56,303/t on 14 August and was still US$56,070/t on 21 August before slightly retreating to US$54,500/t on 1 September.
The restart of Myanmar’s Man Maw mine, which previously represented 7-8% of global supply, continued to be restricted by dewatering requirements, the rainy season and explosives availability. Indonesia’s revised RKAB approvals are similarly slowing the return of supply, while the DRC continues to carry elevated operational and logistics risk. Minsur, the world’s second-largest refined tin producer, produced 7,000t in Q2, which was effectively flat and 0.5% lower year-on-year. Fastmarkets built a new bottom-up model that put total AI-hardware driven tin procurement at 11,340t in 2026, which they expect to rise to 26,510t by 2030, with the solder subset of this rising from 10,160t to 23,640t over the same period – increasing from 4.8% to 10.6% of global solder demand. Solder already represents roughly 52% of global tin consumption, and it is clear that AI hardware is becoming a significant source of incremental demand in this sector – but this research excludes broader tin consumption that will be used in grid connections, substations, backup power, external cooling, semiconductor fabs and communications infrastructure, which is all potential upside tied into the rise of AI.
The sampling locations of the current field program can be seen below, overlaid with the geological interpretation of the project. As well as isolating the best extensional targets in the northern greisen, the undrilled southern greisen and the conceptual eastern under-cover target are also the high priority targets for further investigation:
Source: NRX
The north-south flight lines of the helicopter-borne magnetic and radiometric survey can be seen below, with 250 line-km having been completed with 50 metre line spacing – which will produce far superior results than the historical 1 mile spacing previously completed. Results are due in a month:
Source: NRX
The chart below shows forecast tin demand from the AI hardware chain, with three groups visualised – total demand from AI hardware, solder as a subset of this, and the genuine surplus/incremental demand when factoring in the conventional equipment that will likely be displaced by advances in AI:
Source: Fastmarkets
This work program is setting the scene for a genuinely high impact maiden drilling campaign that will be guided by the best tools in exploration, with geophysics overlaid with previous drilling to correlate anomalism to mineralisation, extensive rock chips to isolate the outcropping mineralised areas that line up with geophysics, confirmation of tungsten in the drill core and how it interacts with tin – and an overarching high confidence JORC exploration target that defines the areas where the most tonnage can be added. With all of this exciting activity in Alaska, adding the potential for a copper discovery in collaboration with S32 in one of the world’s most attractive regions in the next few months – Namibia – it is clear that NRX’s current valuation prices in nearly none of these two massive opportunities.
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Disclaimer: This article is for informational and marketing purposes only, and does not constitute financial advice or a recommendation to invest. All opinions expressed are our own. We may receive fees or other forms of compensation in connection with the publication of this content, and may own shares in any of the mentioned companies. Please do your own research and seek professional advice before making any investment decisions.