Bills, an experienced geologist and manager at WMC and BHP Billiton before taking on his first managing director job at an exploration junior, is coming up on his tenth year at Emmerson and it’s fair to say his ‘big picture’ view of one of Australia’s most historically significant mineral fields hasn’t deviated even as he’s fought volatile equity market conditions and sometimes fickle investor attitudes toward exploration, and fastidiously added the pieces that have made more compelling the minnow’s position on the ground.

Tennant Creek, in Australia’s Northern Territory, has yielded high-grade copper and gold from a series of rich but generally shortlived mines over more than half a century.

Unique exploration JVs, first with Ivanhoe Mines and then standout Australian mid-tier gold miner Evolution, innovative methods and application of technology, prudent deal-making on land, and now a plan to generate cash from a series of small, high-grade mines – which will also deepen its understanding of what’s happening below the surface in a still-intriguing mineral field – have made Emmerson hard to pigeon-hole as a junior explorer.

It’s been hyperactive and aggressive at the same time as being extremely vigilant with investors’ funds – with raw numbers painting a picture Bills sees as being increasingly valuable. They include the $40 million Emmerson has spent on exploration, including on acquisition of new gravity, magnetics, airborne EM, and most recently seismic data; about 50km of drilling has been completed; and some 500sq.km of land acquisitions have been made to take Emmerson’s Tennant Creek footprint to about 3,000sq.km.

“You measure the significance of that by discovery really,” Bills said on a Mining JournalGold Investor Series webinar.

“As you said we’ve put a lot of effort into using the best technology and generating new ideas about how the mineralisation is formed. From all that data we’ve made three discoveries … but I think what those new data sets have really done is set us up for the future in terms of being able to pinpoint further high-grade deposits.”

Emmerson is waiting for the results of new drilling around the deposit targeted for initial small-scale mining later this year – Edna Beryl – and is also keen to get some drilling into an area just picked up between the former White Devil (high-grade gold) and Orlando (high-grade gold and copper) mines in a corridor Bills said had looked interesting for a long time.

“We think there is a continuation of the White Devil trend,” he said. “We’ve been waiting for that tenement to become available for quite a long time, and we’ve just managed to pick it up. We’ve already managed to generate a number of targets based on our conceptual ideas, and once [the licence is] granted we will start an aggressive programme to test that.

“That is under the JV with Evolution Mining.

“We think the use of technology such as seismic and gravity surveys, etc, will allow us to predict where the new mineral discoveries are going to occur at Tennant Creek. We’ve just [late 2015] undertaken quite a large seismic survey both around some of historic deposits, and regionally, so you will hear more about that soon.

“We’ve also just commenced the first of our small mines, Edna Beryl, where we’re working under a tribute agreement with a specialised underground miner. The idea there is that will generate some risk-free cash for Emmerson. Edna Beryl will probably be in production later this year and I think it will be one of the highest-grade small mines in Australia.”

Edna Beryl is one of a series of up to seven small-scale deposits Emmerson has similar plans for, depending on results of the first exercise.

“It’s non-JORC so we can’t talk about them in terms of resources,” Bills said. “But Edna Beryl is somewhere north of 40gpt, based on not many drill holes. Production could be somewhere in the range of 5,000-10,000oz. Once we demonstrate that one works well, develops cash, then we’d move onto the next one.”

It is hoped the small mines could yield more than 100,000oz. Emmerson’s focus, though, will remain on the search for much larger prizes.

It is also expecting to leverage the technical know-how and ideas developed at Tennant Creek, in new exploration for copper-gold targets in northern New South Wales, later this year.

For more on Emmerson Resources’ gold exploration and development strategy, listen to the full webinar for free at https://t.co/YKrvaF11Y9