The playbook — copper · November 2, 2026
C3 drills its best hole yet at Khaleesi — one hole, big numbers
64.9 metres at 3.45% copper-equivalent in southern Peru, with a 23.3-metre core at 6.64% — the highest grade C3 has hit here, from a single hole.
C3 Metals pulled the best hole it has ever drilled at Khaleesi, a greenfield copper-gold project in southern Peru. Hole KHZ5790-005 cut 64.9 metres averaging 3.45% copper-equivalent — a blended grade that rolls copper, gold, silver and moly into one copper number. Inside that run sat a 23.3-metre core grading 6.64% copper-equivalent, which on copper alone is 4.75% plus 1.84 grams of gold per tonne. That is massive-sulphide territory, and the company backs it with photos of semi-massive chalcopyrite — the brassy copper mineral — in the core.
Why it matters comes down to grams and metres: the thickness times the grade. The main 64.9-metre zone works out to about 164 copper-percent-metres, plus a 0.87 g/t gold credit across the same interval worth roughly 57 gold-gram-metres — so this is a real gold hole too, not just copper. The high-grade core alone carries about 111 copper-percent-metres and 43 gold-gram-metres. The address helps: Khaleesi sits in the Andahuaylas-Yauri belt, next door to the big Las Bambas and Constancia mines. The quality-control sampling rate ran at 11% with no flagged problems, and the cutoff was a stated 0.15% copper. Worth knowing: CEO Dan Symons comes from investor relations and corporate development, not mine-building, and the company has raised cash three times in 16 months at rising prices — C$0.30, then C$0.50, then C$1.10. The stock fell 10.7% over three months while copper itself was essentially flat and the copper-equity index slipped 8.2%, so the market has not yet rewarded this.
Now the honest part. This is one hole into a thinly drilled area. No second intercept confirms the high-grade zone yet, and assays for the next two holes, 006 and 007, plus KHZ5950-003, are still pending. True widths are unknown — every number here is downhole core length, and the company says it needs to model the geometry before it can estimate real thickness. The copper-equivalent figure also assumes a flat 80% recovery with zero metallurgical test work done, so the headline grade leans on credits that have not been proven recoverable. The company itself calls this early-stage. Step-out holes of 50 to 100 metres are planned to test whether this is a zone or a one-hole wonder, and a 3DIP geophysical survey is targeted for November 2026.