Metallica Minerals Limited announced a Maiden Inferred Resource for the Cape Flattery Silica West Project (CFS West). The Inferred Resource of 12Mt is based on assay data from twenty-three (23) auger holes drilled on the Western part of EPM 25734 in August 2022 Due to the sporadic nature of the exposed dunes, the auger holes were drilled on a 400m to 1,000m spacing. Although they were not drilled on a grid, the auger holes are well distributed across the resource area.

LiDAR from a survey flown over CFS West in December 2022 was used as the topographic data, providing a reliable surface to interpret the dune profiles. The Mineral Resource Estimate was completed in accordance with the JORC Code (2012) guidelines with Micromine 2023 used to model and evaluate the resource. The block model for the resource was generated using blocks of 100m (L) x 100m (W) x 5m (H) with sub blocks of 5m (L) x 5m (W) x 1m (H).

The blocks were constrained by the interpreted geological boundaries and populated by the Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW) estimation method to interpolate assay grades for each of the chosen elements (SiO2, Fe2O3, Al2O3, LOI and TiO2). To constrain the resource model, small low-lying dunes of less than 10,000t were excluded as it may be uneconomic to extract these small dunes. A topsoil or humus layer of 0.15m was also excluded from the model.

No specific limit was used to guide geological continuity, instead the majority of the dune complex was incorporated in the resource due to adequate geological interpretation of resource above the regional topographic level. A silica (SiO2 %) cut-off grade has not been used for the Western Resource Area, the number of samples below the conventional 98.5% SiO2 cutoff are limited. Associated elements including TiO2 were present in samples where SiO2 is marginally below the conventional cutoff of 98.5%.

Metallurgy assessment from the CFS Eastern Project and Resource Area suggests that elevated TiO2 is readily removed from the silica sand by simple gravity processing therefore upgrading the sand concentration to in excess of the 98.5% SiO2 COG previously applied to resources at Cape Flattery. The density used for the resource estimated was 1.6 t/m3 based on data collected from the Eastern Resource Area, where the density ranged from 1.50 to 1.66 t/m3 with an average 1.6 t/m3 from 39 different site locations. Due to the evident similarities in the silica sand material, this density has been adopted for the tonnage calculations in the CFS West Project.