From Discovery to Dominance : 2026 Set to Be ‘Absoluteley Brilliant’ For Empire Metals
“…If you have the worlds largest resource and you can double it just by drilling a few more holes I thought why not…”
Only two months in and 2026 is shaping up to be a stellar year for Empire Metals. Managing Director Shaun Bunn is predicting an ‘absolute brilliant’ twelve months as the company embarks on its biggest drill programme to date at the Pitfield project with its titanium deposit. This is the asset that at the time of discovery two years ago was described as a 40-kilometre long, eight-kilometre wide, five-kilometre deep inverted Mount Everest.
Back to 2026 and Empire has devised a drilling matrix designed to investigate the quality of the grades of titanium in the deposit. Previous drilling has already shown that the ore body is remarkably impurity-free with virtually no ilmenite, and this according to Bunn gives Empire a metallurgical advantage over its competitors.
The drilling programme will be concluded within two months, with assays going into the laboratories within weeks with the promise of a drip feeding of results throughout and not at the end of the campaign.
Those results and the grades discovered are awaited by an ever-increasing audience as the company is paraded by the Canberra-based Critical Minerals Organisation as the next big thing and conversations are being had with JOGMEC, the government-owned ‘Japan Organization for Metals and Energy Security.’
“We’re already on a lot of big boys’ radars,” says Bunn and depending on what the drill campaign reveals, “this is just going to clearly transport us into a super-giant status.”
“We’ve really got the management team in place. We’re well funded. The exploration risk is really off the table. We’re really focusing on getting into resource reserves. Process flow sheet is almost laid out. We’re almost in a position to take that to the engineers and run it through the studies that we need to do.”
The 754-hole drill programme at Pitfield sounds gargantuan, but investors will learn a lot over a short period of time. As Shaun explains to Sarah Lowther in this video interview the next few months should yield some ‘really exciting’ process information so investors can see what is the timeframe now through mine permitting, final economic studies, decision to invest, all of that can be laid out towards the middle to late this year.”
Empire Metals featured in our 20 Mining Companies to follow in 2026
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The author was remunerated but does not hold shares in the company
