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[Ferro-Alloys.com] Thrill of the drill: Black Canyon hyper-focused on 2026 exploration

This article is a sponsored feature from Mining.com.au partner Black Canyon. It is not financial advice. Talk to a registered financial expert before making investment decisions.

Cashed-up junior explorer Black Canyon (ASX:BCA) is laser-focused on rolling out its Pilbara drilling programs between April and June this year, off the back of a “big” 2025.

In an interview with Mining.com.au, the company’s Managing Director Brendan Cummins outlines a potential timeline for 2026 and beyond, which could see the Western Australian company bring manganese to market as early as the end of 2028.

In late 2024, Black Canyon attracted $2.5 million in funding, positioning it to launch exploration for manganese along a 3km-long ridge at the Wandanya Project, which Cummins has previously described as “significant and remains open in multiple directions”.

In 2025, it announced both high-grade manganese and iron ore intersects from the Wandanya Project. These discoveries complement the significant manganese mineral resources the company has defined in the east of the Pilbara, which boasts the largest contained manganese deposits in Western Australia and the second largest in Australia after the Groote Eylandt manganese deposit in the Northern Territory.

With such high investor interest, the company raised $10 million to continue exploration and pre-development activities.

Following the second manganese and iron discovery at Wandanya, Black Canyon’s share price leapt from $0.05 to nearly $0.50, at which point “people started to sit up and take a bit more notice”, according to Cummins.

“It was very rewarding from a technical point of view in that we were able to announce a genuine discovery because manganese is actually quite hard to find with potentially economic grades with scale, and no one had found anything significant for decades prior to our discovery.

“The fact that we’ve received strong investor recognition for a manganese discovery in an environment that is more interested in precious metals and copper speaks to the significance of the project.

“It’s a much harder commodity for investors to understand and back.

“That all changed when we found the higher grade Wandanya manganese and iron discovery, that’s our main focus and that’s the kind of discovery that you can envisage getting into production in the short to medium term.

“Longer term, we have a significant manganese mineral resource across the Balfour Manganese Field (BMF) that may develop into a long life mine down the track.”

A year of consolidation

While 2025 was a “massive year”, Cummins says 2026 will be centred on advancing the discovery through the next stage. He continues:

“Through systematic drill programs in 2025 we found 3km of very continuous mineralisation to date and we plan to commence infill drilling. However, the mapped mineralisation system could be as long as 9km, so we need to commence further extension and discovery drilling across this. The mineralisation shallowly dips to the east and remains open to the east as well.

“It’s a significant mineralisation system and it’s remarkable no one has mapped, sampled, or drilled it before BCA.

“We haven’t found the extent of the mineralisation yet, but we are demonstrating scale and, by the end of June, we should have completed sufficient drilling to decide if we are in a position to estimate a maiden mineral resource that will help define the quantity and quality of manganese and iron mineralisation.”

“It’s a significant mineralisation system and it’s remarkable no one has mapped, sampled, or drilled it before BCA”

Cummins says following the resource estimation the company can rapidly move towards the completion of a Scoping Study which will be “the first high-level investigation at the value of the project for both iron and manganese”.

At the same time, Black Canyon will be running parallel studies for feasibility.

“In some ways, we can do things a little bit differently because we have a lot of confidence that what we’ve discovered to date has serious potential for development and will require detailed development studies prior to building an operation”, Cummins says.

“Therefore, we are willing to spend the money now to help de-risk some of those studies.

“They include understanding the transport logistics, doing more detailed metallurgy to further understand process design, and simple but critical aspects of a project like finding process water. Normally, you would do that later, certainly well after a Scoping Study, but there is value in de-risking what we can early on rather than waiting until we are suddenly on the critical path, potentially jeopardising the project development schedule.

“The same applies to permitting and approvals, that’s a massive part of any project so we will aim to progress these sooner rather than later as we develop the appropriate strategy to make sure we can deliver these in a timely manner.”

Ambitious timeline to bring manganese to market

Cummins says after data gathering in 2026, in early 2027 the company will most likely transition into the feasibility phase, with aims for approvals in late 2027 and development in 2028.

“We are targeting late 2028 for product to go to market. While that seems like a long time, there is a minimum time frame to develop a project successfully and anyone suggesting you can do it in a shorter period may not have developed a project recently in WA”, Cummins says.

Metallurgical testing in 2025 on Wandanya material inspired the company with confidence that it could deliver a consistent high-grade premium 40%-plus manganese oxide product, with Cummins citing ambitions to continue metallurgical test work to shore up the flowsheet and concentrate specifications.

By October last year, Black Canyon’s drill results revealed Wandanya’s highest-ever manganese grades, with multiple holes averaging at above 35% manganese.

Demand for High-Purity Manganese Mono Sulphate (HPMSM) is reaching fever pitch in Europe, China, and the US for use in lithium-ion batteries in electric vehicles.

Key players in the manganese market include Europe, North America, Japan, and Korea who import almost 100% of the HPMSM required for current-generation EVs and bulk-storage batteries, but also for the next-generation high-manganese content batteries.

China has dominated the manganese sulphate market for the past 20–30 years with a staggering global production of more than 90%.

“That’s the story of our time, all this material coming from China. They’ve had long-term plans about securing minerals, they’ve been scouring the globe looking for deposits so it can feed back into China and dominate the supply chain of many critical minerals”, Cummins says.

“As we learnt in the post-Covid world, we need to reduce reliance on narrow supply chains and should encourage a more diversified approach. The trade wars just seem to be ramping up, and market volatility is at an all-time high.

“The fact is that over the last 20 years China has invested wisely and massively into securing its supply chains from the pit to downstream and manufacturing at significant scale and now it seems the rest of the world is just waking up.”

The ‘forgotten’ commodity

Manganese is often described as the “forgotten commodity”.

“However, 18–20 million tonnes of manganese metal is needed every year and 95% of that goes into the production of steel. A small amount goes into the production of manganese sulphate for fertilisers and for EV batteries”, Cummins says.

So, it is ironic that a 20-million-tonnes-per-annum market for manganese is considered a forgotten commodity when it is also the fifth-largest traded commodity on the planet behind iron ore, chromium, aluminium, and copper.

Furthermore, in the production of steel manganese it’s non-substitutable and each tonne of steel produced contains between 5kg and 15kg of manganese averaging around 10kg per tonne. So, as long as we need steel, we will need manganese.

In Australia there are only two manganese operations and Black Canyon’s projects are geographically well placed to supply countries like China and India due to the proximity to market, which means lower shipping costs compared to competitors located in South Africa and Gabon.

Black Canyon listed on the ASX in 2021. Its current market capitalisation sits at $60.44 million with about 161 million shares on issue and $10.5 million in cash at the end of the December 2025 quarter.

• [Editor:tianyawei]