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Doug Bright
Litchfield Minerals says its BHP Xplor-backed technical work has changed the way it looks at its Harts Range ground in Australiaโs Northern Territory, shifting the story from a handful of separate copper and nickel prospects to a potentially much bigger belt-scale mineral system.
The company says the work it has completed through the global minerโs Xplor program has tied together a stack of complex geophysical and geological information across the Harts Range belt, 100 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs.
It has also built a model to help generate better-ranked drill targets across a district the company now sees as a broader copper-nickel search space.
BHP Xplor is a nine-month accelerator program that gives selected early-stage explorers access to non-dilutive funding, technical specialists, mentors and exploration methods which are normally well beyond the reach of smaller companies.
โThe input from BHP Xplor has fundamentally changed the way we see Harts Range.โ
Litchfield Minerals managing director Matt Pustahya
Litchfield was selected for the 2026 program and has secured US$500,000 (A$781,000) in funding and technical support.
In plain terms, the new work has tried to answer whether Litchfieldโs Harts Range has the full plumbing system needed to form large copper or nickel sulphide deposits.
That means determining whether deep rocks could supply the metals, whether major faults could move metal-rich fluids or magmas upwards and whether the system has already shown it can concentrate those metals in the right places.
Litchfield says the work so far points strongly in that direction. The studies cite repeated deep-sourced magmatic events, long-lived crustal-scale structures and known copper and nickel sulphide mineralisation in the district as evidence that the broader Harts Range belt has the ingredients needed for larger discoveries.
Litchfield Minerals managing director Matt Pustahya said: โThe input from BHP Xplor has fundamentally changed the way we see Harts Range. While Oonagalabi remains a key focus of our exploration efforts, our understanding of the region has evolved significantly.โ
The key technical clue that supports this conclusion is a deep conductive feature referred to as โC2โณ, identified in reprocessed magnetotelluric and seismic reflection data beneath the nearby third-party Blackadder and Baldrick nickel-copper-PGE prospects.
MT is a geophysical method that uses natural electric and magnetic fields to map how well rocks conduct electricity at depth.
Conductive rocks are not automatically mineralised, let alone economic, because graphite, fluids and several alteration minerals can also produce positive responses to the method.
But the company says the position of C2 beneath known nickel-copper mineralisation provides a useful indicator for the model and a solid reason to get on the hunt for similar features elsewhere across its ground.
The important catch here is that C2 is visible in more closely spaced historical survey data but is not picked up in broader regional data collected at 50km spacing.
This means that meaningful targets may have been missed by previous, more regional-scale work, particularly beneath areas of shallow cover where there is little outcrop to guide old-school prospecting.
Litchfieldโs next move is to run two 50km-long MT and gravity survey lines across its Harts Range portfolio. The MT stations will be spaced at 1km intervals and gravity readings at 500m intervals, giving the company much tighter coverage than the previous regional datasets.
The gravity survey will help identify higher-density bodies that could be linked to intrusions, while MT will chase conductive zones that may point to metal sulphides or major mineralising fluid pathways.
Where the two methods produce coincident results, the targets will move higher on the companyโs list for follow-up geophysics and eventual drilling.
Litchfield will also fold the new results into its magnetic, structural, geochemical and geological datasets before finally ranking the best conductive and dense areas across Harts Range.
The latest work follows a busy March quarter for Litchfield, during which it advanced drilling and geophysics and reported strong copper-zinc drill hits from the Main Zone at Oonagalabi. It also kicked off a 5,523-line-kilometre airborne magnetic and radiometric survey at its separate Lucy Creek project in the NT.
The company ended the quarter with $5.4M in cash.
The Harts Range update is not a drill hit and it is not a discovery on its own. But it does give Litchfield a clearer playbook for what to look for next, where to look and why the next round of geophysics could matter. On a busy news day, that is the bit investors can most easily hang their hats on.
Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: mattbirney@bullsnbears.com.au
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