Kodiak drilling for growth

A blood red sun slowly sets as the smell and smoke of distant fire hang over Merritt, British Columbia, where Kodiak Copper is cashed up and looking to follow in...

A blood red sun slowly sets as the smell and smoke of distant fire hang over Merritt, British Columbia, where Kodiak Copper is cashed up and looking to follow in the footsteps of neighbours Highland Valley and Copper Mountain with its MPD project. The company could be one resource update away, which is planned for the March quarter of 2027, from generating more serious attention by confirming the scale that the December 2025 maiden resource suggested might be possible. That resource included an indicated resource of 82.9Mt grading 0.39% of copper equivalent containing 519Mlb of copper and 390,000oz of gold, with another 356.3Mt of inferred resources containing 1.9Blb of copper and 1.28Moz of gold at a 0.2% cut-off.

Tornquist believes that executing on this and putting together enough tonnage to justify undertaking a preliminary economic assessment one will put Kodiak on a similar trajectory towards a $1 billion market capitalisation that GT Gold and Doubleview followed. Kodiak's market capitalisation is currently about $75 million, and so it has a ways to go. Chief executive Claudia Tornquist said during a site visit that this puts it right up there with Kodiak's neighbours in terms of grade, particularly as the producing mines operate profitably at cut-off grades of 0.10–0.12%.Ore at Kodiak's MPD project | Credits: Paul HarrisKodiak has spent the better part of a decade stitching together a large land package at MPD where historical operators collectively drilled 73,000m. Having added 89,201m of its own across 192 holes, and defined seven deposits in its maiden resource (Ketchan, Gate, Man and Dillard to the north, and West, Adit and South to the south), Having raised C$15 million in an oversubscribed June 2026 financing, the company added 10,000m to its planned 6,500m drilling programme, with 16,500m of resource-expansion drilling underway.

Roughly two-thirds of that metreage is going into resource-definition drilling across the existing deposits, with the balance testing new targets. Most of what's been drilled so far sits within 300–400m of surface; only the Gate zone has been tested to real depth, reaching roughly 800m and hinting at underground potential well below the current pit-constrained resource. Initial metallurgical test work suggests that the deposits will produce clean sulphide flotation concentrates, as do Copper Mountain and Highland Valley.

Drilling began at the Ketchan deposit, which Kodiak has never drilled before, with an early expansion hole targeting depth extension near the deposit's middle. Of the new targets, Par was worked up through soil sampling, which is effective even though the area was glaciated, and outcropping rock at the surface shows high-sulphidation-style alteration with pyrite and chalcopyrite. Arizona To help Kodiak focus on its prize at MPD, the company agreed in April 2026 to combine its Mohave project near Bagdad, Arizona, with Teck Resources' Copper Hill project, also in Arizona, into a new, separately-listed explorer, Kay Copper, that is targeting its own TSX Venture listing.