The playbook — copper · September 30, 2026
Southern Flats steps out 200 m west — a second porphyry centre firms up
Hercules extends its Idaho copper discovery with 287 m of 0.58% copper-equivalent, but the 1 km link to Leviathan stays undrilled.
On September 30, Hercules Metals said it drilled a hole at its Idaho copper project that cut 286.52 metres of 0.58% copper-equivalent — copper plus a bit of other metals, converted into one number — with a richer 65.54-metre core inside it running 0.80% copper-equivalent. The hole, HER-26-01, sits 200 metres west of the original discovery hole at a spot the company calls Southern Flats. The intercept lies deep: between 862 and 1,149 metres below surface, under a fault-dropped block of thick cover rock. When we last covered Hercules, the story was a different target — Hook — where one hole was still waiting on assays.
Why it matters: for a copper porphyry — a big, low-grade copper body formed around an old magma plume — thickness beats flash. Nearly 287 metres of steady 0.58% is the bulk-tonnage rock these deposits live on. More important, a second hole 200 metres from the first turns Southern Flats from a lucky shot into a real porphyry centre with continuity traced across that gap. The company’s 3D model reads it as a possible 1 km southern extension of its main Leviathan discovery, tracing a strike length of about 1,000 metres — but that link is modelled, not drilled. Running the numbers: 286.52 m by 0.58% works out to 166 copper-equivalent percent-metres, with the core adding 52. The team carries weight too — CEO George Ogilvie’s crew built Arizona Sonoran into a C$2 billion Hudbay sale, and the stock is up 133.9% in three months while copper gained 6.9% and the copper-miner ETF added 11.8%. That surge dwarfs both — the market is pricing something specific.
What to watch: this is still a two-hole zone. True width is not stated — the release says there isn’t enough data, so the 287 m and 66 m are downhole core lengths that may overstate the real thickness. The 1 km gap to Leviathan remains untested, and assays for the gap-fill holes — HER-26-04 pending, with HER-26-05 and -06 drilling now — will show whether the two centres actually connect. The mineralization is deep and lacks the near-surface enrichment blanket seen at Leviathan. And the Hook assays we flagged last time are still not back — that promise stays open, and the Hook core drill still waits on permitting targeted for 2027.