The playbook — gold · August 31, 2026
Gold in all seven holes at Stavaträsk — and the vein runs deeper
Hannan's maiden drill program hit gold across 650 metres of strike in Sweden, with the two deepest holes confirming the system continues down-dip.
Hannan Metals just finished its first-ever drilling at Stavaträsk, a gold project in Sweden’s Skellefeå district — the same belt that hosts Boliden’s mines. Seven holes went down, totalling about 1,040 metres. Every single hole hit gold. The headline came from the final two. Hole ST2606 cut 4.6 metres grading 7.2 grams of gold per tonne (roughly a fifth of an ounce packed into every tonne of rock), including a richer 0.7-metre slice running 21.4 grams per tonne. That high-grade vein sits inside a much broader 60-metre zone averaging 1.1 grams per tonne. Gold turned up across 650 metres of strike — the length of the mineralised structure along surface.
The reason this matters is depth. The two deepest holes both hit the vein system, which tells you it keeps going down-dip rather than pinching out near surface — the kind of early de-risking that lets a company keep drilling with confidence. Michael Hudson, Hannan’s Chairman and CEO, is a serial discoverer with 30-plus years across Sweden, Finland and Australia; on Hannan’s separate Peru copper-gold ground, Japan’s JOGMEC signed a joint venture and Teck Resources took a strategic stake near 9.84% — the most concrete outside validation of the company’s work. The assays here are real: individual samples topped 20 grams per tonne, and the rock carries silver and copper alongside gold. Still, the best composite works out to about 33 gram-metres — grade times width — which is modest. This is discovery-mode drilling on a frontier corridor, not a defined deposit. The stock has trailed both its mining peers and the broader Canadian market over the past year, so the market has not yet repriced shares in response to the exploration news flow.
Now the caveats, because they matter. Hannan explicitly says the true width of the veins is not known — every interval quoted is downhole core length, which can overstate the real thickness of the zone. Only two of the seven holes are reported in detail here, so the full-strike claim leans on earlier releases. The Boliden comparison is a rock-type analogue, nothing more, and historical drill data near the site is unverified. Stavaträsk is also an option earn-in, not owned outright. The company says the next steps are an IP geophysical survey across the 650 metres of strike to map sulphide structures, a 3D geological model, and a planned ~1,000-metre second drill program testing depth and along-strike targets — though no dates were given for any of it in the release.