The company, which is looking for $6-8 million at 20c, has earmarked $2.5-3.4 million for testing its six granted licences and two applications that cover 345sq.km that it considers prospective for copper and base metals, given their proximity to Glencore's world class Mt Isa mine, along the same faulty system.
However, Chalkos' Mount Isa copper occurrences are described as "distinctly different" from the nearby epigenetic replacement-style sediment-hosted massive sulphide deposit at Mount Isa and George Fisher.
It has used a mineral systems approach, which emphasises critical geological elements to form a deposit rather than absolute conformity to a deposit model. It says its approach will use existing data, which suggests an atypical hybrid IOCG-orogenic mineralisation model as a guide.
Chalkos sees indications for copper, west of the Mount Isa Fault, which does not fit the SHMS model, leading to it being overlooked during past work by former holder Mt Isa Mines that involved sporadic exploration for copper-gold systems.
The company is already using $1.6 million seed funding to complete seven diamond holes testing three of the 13 priority targets identified to date at Goya North, Bambino and Eldorado East, with the assays expected in the December quarter.
It also completed an IP survey across two targets at the Frida prospect.
The remaining 10 targets will see some 7000m of drilling at the seven known copper prospects: Dali, Goya, Frida, Eldorado, Bambino, Turpentine and Federol West.
The company secured the tenements last year from vendors, including former directors Matthew Pustahya and Daryl Henthorn, as a step towards listing.
Its predecessor companies had conducted early works, including a small shallow drilling program at Frida in 2018, returning assays such as 3m at 1.02% copper and 3.9 grams per tonne silver from 28m.
The last substantive work by MIM was the drilling of a 584m-deep hole at the Dali prospect, which had copper-gold anomalism in outcrop and a resistivity anomaly at depth.
The hole intersected alternating magnetite and haematite dominated zones with chalcocite occurrences, did not resolve the target. There was a second target that was not tested when the program was cancelled.
Deep Yellow also explored for uranium for about a decade, which has been known in the area since the 1950s, but did not assay for other metals.
In 2017, Xstrata assayed rock chips remaining from the 2009 Deep Yellow RC drilling. Although initially dismissed as "insignificant" by the Xstrata geologists at the time, the pXRF work positively identified copper mineralisation.
Chalkos' board is headed up by the former chief financial officer for Glencore's Queensland metals division, executive chair Andrew Newman.
He is joined by non-executive director and structural geologist Dr Rick Gordon, who was most recently at Northern Star Resources and Barrick Gold, with notable discoveries including Pegasus and Millennium, and ex-American Rare Earths and Redbank Copper director Keith Middleton.
