Drilling is underway to extend the mineral resource at the Barbara copper project in North-West Queensland as Aeris Resources looks to open a new chapter at the mothballed mine.

Six diamond drillholes for a total of 1,552.8m were completed during the last quarter, with assays pending, the company said this week.

It plans a further nine holes to test potential extensions of the south lode to the north-west and south-east, and down plunge.

In its quarterly report to the market, Aeris said it would update the mineral resource for the site early next year – to be followed by a mining study to determine the viability of an underground operation.

Aeris acquired Barbara and the Mount Colin underground operation in a $234 million takeover of Round Oak Minerals, which also added the Jaguar zinc-copper mine in Western Australia and the Stockman copper-zinc development project in Victoria to its assets.

The Barbara deposit, 70km north-east of Mount Isa, has an established underground mineral resource of 1.8Mt grading at 2.2 per cent copper, 0.2g/t gold and 3.4g/t silver for a contained metal total of 40,000t copper, 10,000oz gold and 201,000oz of silver.

The site hosted an open-pit copper mine from March 2019 to December 2020, with sulphide ore crushed and trucked to Mount Isa for processing.

Aeris said it was also in the process of re-establishing the greenfields exploration effort across its 967sq km tenement package in North-West Queensland.

This entails a compilation of all exploration data and integration with a recent hyperspectral survey to determine knowledge gaps and identify and rank exploration targets.