The playbook — copper · October 5, 2026
Altar drills a kilometre and a half of copper in one hole
Infill drilling at Aldebaran's Argentine porphyry hit 1,728.9 m of 0.45% CuEq, which the company says will feed a 2026 resource update and a pre-feasibility study targeted for 2027.
Aldebaran Resources drilled a hole at its Altar copper-gold project in Argentina that cut 1,728.9 metres of continuous mineralization grading 0.45% copper-equivalent — copper plus a little gold and silver converted into one number. That is more than a kilometre and a half of rock from a single hole. Inside it sat a richer 756-metre stretch at 0.68% CuEq. Four other holes each returned between 800 and 940 metres of similar material, and one, hole 266, ran 918.8 metres at 0.62% CuEq starting just 59 metres below surface. The company reports these are true thicknesses — the real width of the deposit, not a thick-looking angle through it.
The grades sound modest, and they are — 0.4 to 0.7% copper is ordinary for a porphyry, a giant low-grade copper system you mine by the open pit. What matters here is length. Gram-metres, the grade multiplied by the thickness, tell the story: hole 260’s main interval works out to about 778 CuEq percent-metres, the kind of number that comes from scale, not richness. This is infill drilling, holes drilled between known holes to firm up what is already there, so it is meant to turn lower-confidence “inferred” ounces into higher-confidence ones rather than to find new ground. The company says the results will feed an updated resource estimate it expects to release this month and a pre-feasibility study it targets for 2027. CEO John Black, who sold his last company to First Quantum for C$650 million in 2010, runs the show; chief geologist Kevin Heather signs off as the qualified person. The stock rose 9.2% over three months — exactly matching its copper-equity peer index, so this was the sector tide, not a reward for Altar specifically.
A few honest limits. The copper-equivalent figure leans on an assumed price deck — copper at US$3.00 a pound, gold at US$1,400 an ounce — both below current prices, plus recovery rates partly drawn from historical and analog work rather than Altar’s own metallurgy. The release does not state the cut-off grade used to build the intervals. And because this was an infill and geotechnical program, several holes drilled for pit-wall engineering — 270, 272, 273 and 275 — returned nothing worth reporting, which was expected by design. The company has guided for an October resource update that, for the first time, would incorporate the Radio Porphyry zone; the pre-feasibility study is targeted for the second or third quarter of 2027.