The company recently reported drilling results of 46m grading 1.7% copper equivalent including 10m grading 3.6% copper equivalent at the Seel breccia at its Ootsa project, which followed a hit of 422m grading 0.52% copper equivalent including 200m grading 0.6% copper equivalent at West Seel in November.

With 46 holes from the 2021 Ootsa drill programme still to be returned as well as nine from the Berg programme, a resource update for Ootsa is planned for 2022. Ootsa currently hosts a resource of 224 million tonnes grading 0.44% copper equivalent while Berg hosts 610Mt grading 0.41% copper equivalent.

Surge has grown its land position in the district to about 1,200 square miles over the past year which hosts several porphyry deposits. Within this, Ootsa and Berg are about 22km apart and in the vicinity of Imperial Metal's idled Huckleberry mill, and other infrastructure, including the hydroelectric power gird.

"The big value proposition for a district like this is the fact that you have a lot of infrastructure in place, and the fact that its already a well-defined resource endowment, with a lot of areas that are under explored. We commissioned one of the largest Z-TEM geophysical surveys globally last year in partnership which is going to help us with a lot of regional discovery type drilling and exploration over the course of the next year," said Neilson.

With Ootsa set to grow in size, the company has started work on an economic study to show how the various deposits could hang together under a production scenario. "We have a lot of work to do to figure out how all the pieces could possibly fit together. There is a mill which doesn't have a huge remaining reserve life, and what becomes of that in the future is to be determined," said Neilson.

"A lot of the component pieces to an economic study are underway already. We are working on a number of different trade-offs in relation to component pieces to project concepts. Same thing with metallurgy. All of these deposits, as well as the main deposit up at Berg, have had quite extensive historical metallurgical test work done. We're looking to move that down the track even further, but it's certainly at an acceptable stage right now for a preliminary economic assessment. We haven't put a marker down in terms of when and what it will look like so it's something we should know a lot more about during 2022," he said.

Shares in Surge Copper are trading at C30c, valuing the company at $50 million.