Metallica Minerals Limited announced that the infill drilling program completed by the company in December 2021 has successfully increased the Measured and Indicated Resources from 47.8Mt @ 99.18% SiO2 to 51.9Mt @ 99.18% SiO2. Notably there has been a 74% increase in the Measured Resource from 9.6Mt to 16.7Mt, which will be assessed as part of the DFS to support an increased portion of the early mine life. Of note, the area that contains the Measured Resource is the likely initial mining area for the project.

This area contains the higher silica grades and lowest iron content. The Measured Resource is also close to the planned processing and transhipping facilities which will minimise material movement and costs. Samples collected within the Measured Resource area from the August 2021 drilling program have been composited to produce a representative bulk sample for metallurgical test-work.

This bulk sample is currently being processed by Minerals Technologies for plant design purposes. The Upgraded Resource was estimated by Ausrocks Pty Ltd. using data from all three of Cape Flattery Silica's (CFS) main drilling programs, with the most recent program completed in December 2021. The Resource utilises data from a total of 152 vertical vacuum and auger drill holes, comprising 2,538m of drilling.

Holes were drilled using a vacuum rig mounted on a tractor with 1m samples collected in a clear Perspex cyclone. Samples were taken every 1m and the holes were either terminated due to wet ground when the water table was encountered or when the hole intersected iron rich clays or basement rocks. All the samples were dispatched to ALS in Brisbane for analysis and laboratory check samples were undertaken by Intertek in Perth.

The infill and step out drilling completed in December 2021 and the observed geology supports the increase in the Measured component of the Resource and the infill drilling also confirmed the robust nature of the model with a majority of the Inferred Resource becoming Indicated with the additional infill drilling completed in December 2021. Modelling of the silica sand Resource was undertaken using; 25m (L) x 25m (W) x 2m (H) with sub blocks 5m (L) x 5m (W) x 0.5m (H) which were used to generate the block model. The blocks were constrained by the model boundaries, i.e. topography, geology, water table, base of hole and populated by the Ordinary Kriging (OK) estimation method to interpolate assay grades for each of the chosen elements (SiO2, Fe2O3, Al2O3, TiO2 and LOI Inverse Distance Weighting (IDW - 2:1) was used to check the model and yielded similar results.