BLACK CANYON LTD (BCA) - A High-Grade Manganese Seam Is Taking Shape In Western Australia Artwork

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BLACK CANYON LTD (BCA) - A High-Grade Manganese Seam Is Taking Shape In Western Australia

August 21, 2026 • Andrew Musgrave

0:00 | 13:32

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A manganese discovery that drills like a seam, sits near surface, and may produce a saleable concentrate with simple separation is the kind of story that can move fast on the ASX. We’re joined by Brendan Cummins, Managing Director of Black Canyon Limited, to break down what’s emerging at Wandanya in the Pilbara region of Western Australia and why the market is paying attention to this high-grade manganese and iron ore pairing.

We talk through the drilling campaign and what a near-90% hit rate suggests about continuity, thickness, and mining confidence, plus what the next RC program is trying to prove on the northern and southern extensions. Brendan also explains the thinking behind a large gravity survey designed to look deeper, asking the bigger geological question: where did the manganese-rich fluids come from, and could there be a second concealed system below what’s already been found?

On the processing and product side, we dig into metallurgy results, including density-based separation producing manganese oxide concentrates above 40% Mn with strong recoveries, and why that matters for capex and operating costs. We also unpack iron ore test work pointing to a durable lump product and the commercial meaning of “direct ship ore”, where simpler crushing and screening can translate into a cleaner development pathway.

We finish with the roadmap: the maiden mineral resource estimate, scoping study inputs, funding runway, and the catalysts investors should watch across the next 12 months. If you want more clear, jargon-free updates on Australian mining, exploration and development, subscribe, share this episode, and leave us a review.

Andrew Musgrave

Welcome to another episode of ASX Briefs. And today we're joined by Brendan Cummins, the Managing Director of Black Canyon Limited, a manganese development and exploration company with projects located in the mineral-rich exporting hub of the Pilbara region in Western Australia. Brendan, great to have you with me today and welcome to the ASX Briefs podcast.

Brendan Cummins

Yeah, thanks, Andrew. Great to be here on the pod. And yeah, really looking forward to having a chat.

Andrew Musgrave

Okay. Now, Brendan, for listeners that haven't followed the Black Canyon story recently, can you just give us a brief overview of the company and how the Wandanya fits alongside the existing Balfour manganese field resource?

Brendan Cummins

Yeah, so Black Canyon, we're an ASX-listed company. We listed in May 2021, so just over five years old. We've always been a manganese-focused explorer and soon to be a developer, we hope. Now, Wandanya is a green fields discovery, it's a pretty exciting discovery. A broker I was speaking to when we first announced it, he said this is basically the best manganese discovery in Australia for the past couple of decades and of course, I tend to agree with that. So, look it's a really unique high-grade discovery. Everyone's been looking for the next Woodie Woodie in WA up on the East Pilbara, but we've found something that's got the grade slightly different, and it just it's got so many attributes that you want to discover as part of a project to make the mining efficient, the processing efficient, and so forth. So that's really our focus at the moment. The Balfour Manganese field is a 315-million-ton resource that we have discovered across the measured, indicated and inferred resources. That's the manganese bank. There's a huge amount of manganese in that, and that's something that's probably secondary to the Wandanya discovery at the moment.

Andrew Musgrave

And the Wandanya is being pitched as a dual commodity discovery, manganese and iron together. How did that combination come about and why does having both make this a more compelling development story?

Brendan Cummins

Look, the geological gods have has certainly blessed Black Canyon with this discovery. To find high grade manganese and high-grade iron in the same location is really unique and generally up in the Pilbara, when you do find manganese with iron, it's a problem, a metallurgical problem. But in our case, we've actually got quite distinct manganese mineralization and then right adjacent to it is high grade hematite mineralization and it's a geological oddity, and that's why you know finding ore bodies is difficult because you're always looking for the geological oddities. And in our case, I wouldn't say stumbled across, but, you know, a bit of a bit of exploration up there in the Pilbara boots on ground, and then we were quite fortunate enough to find outcropping high-grade manganese and high-grade iron. And we've done a heap of drilling on it since then. That's going back to 2024. So certainly, hasn't been an overnight success. There's been a lot of hard work to getting those to this position.

Andrew Musgrave

And touching on that drilling, you've now reported assays for 786 of the 929 holes drilled with a hit rate of almost nine out of 10 holes. So that's a pretty extraordinary strike rate. So, what does that tell you about the consistency of the system?

Brendan Cummins

What it really tells us is that this mineralization is very consistent. So, we've done a massive drill out. We did 17,000 odd meters this year over about three months. That's our fourth drill program into the deposit. So, the first drill program, very small, 600 meters, second drill programs and third drill program, we probably looked at you know another five to six thousand meters. And on that basis, we got a high degree of confidence that over several kilometres the mineralization was very consistent. So, we've just got out and just blanket drilled it on a 50 by 50, and that's why we've got such a high success rate. What essentially, we're drilling is a seam of manganese that is you know five to ten meters thick. It's over about three and a half kilometres long, probably five to six hundred meters wide, less than twenty meters depth. So, I guess you can describe it as a like a like an equivalent to a coal bed where it's just very consistent mineralization, but it's manganese. And manganese is worth a hell of a lot more than coal and iron ore.

Andrew Musgrave

And you're about to recommence RC drilling in August with a 5,000-meter program testing the 2.8-kilometre northern extension and the 1.4-kilometre southern extension. What would a good result from that program look like?

Brendan Cummins

So, we're really quite fortunate that we haven't closed it off yet. So, to the south, the last drill line, we're still open to the south, and we've mapped manganese and iron mineralization in pods down to 1.4 kilometres to the south. So, we've just got to drill it. Like we're all heritage approved, it's the lines have been cleared, the rigs turning up probably next week sometime. So, what are we looking at? The 24th. We should be drilling again, all things being equal, 24th August and then to the north, there's two still 2.8 kilometres of outcropping iron mineralization, never had a drill hole in it. So, pretty keen to get the rig back out there and start banging some more holes in. And we've been so lucky, so fortunate with the discovery so far. Let's hope the good fortune continues.

Andrew Musgrave

You've also got a gravity survey underway, more than 80% complete, specifically designed to hunt for deeper concealed manganese linked to hydrothermal mineralization. Is there a real possibility for a second deeper system under what you've already found?

Brendan Cummins

Well, geo’s, forever the optimists, I’m a geologist, have been doing this for 30 years. You've got to think outside the box, and that's how we found this deposit to start with, but then you step one back, and you start thinking, well, where does this manganese come from? Where do these manganese rich fluids come from? So, you just got to look deeper, and you know, through the gravity work that we've completed, it's a 10 kilometre by about three and a half to four-kilometre-wide survey, huge survey. We've been quite fortunate that it was half funded by the government under the expiration incentive scheme. We've only just completed that, so we're still waiting for results to come back on that one. But you know, if we see some deeper seeded high-density targets, they may be related to manganese, they may not be, but it's expiration risk as you know, that is fairly typical of this style of mineralization. But yeah, we'll put some deep holes into that and see if we can pull out some hydrothermal manganese as opposed to the stratiform manganese that we're found at Wandanya.

Andrew Musgrave

Now, your stage two and three heavy liquid separation test work has consistently produced manganese oxide concentrates of over 40% manganese, and in some cases closer to or exceeding the minimum 44% benchmark. How significant is it that you're getting there with what you've described as a simple low complexity density-based method?

Brendan Cummins

So, the beauty with manganese is that it's very heavy relative to the host rocks. So, when you put it in a in a heavy media, it's it sinks and then the waste rock floats, and that's how you separate it out. So, it's a really simple methodology of separating out the ore from the waste. So, from the get-go, with any with any new project, you know, because it was a Greenfield's discovery, there'd been no metallurgical test work on this style of manganese mineralization. So, I wanted to know very quickly and early can we produce a product? There's no point in spending company money on doing big drill outs and you know further advancing the project if you can't actually get a saleable product. So very early, did those heavy liquid separation test work, and we were able to produce 40% manganese from a whole heap of grade feeds, you know, from feed stocks ranging from 25 up to up to 30, 35, 40 percent, getting over 44, getting to 50% manganese concentrate. So really outstanding results from that dense media separation work that we've completed. Also getting very good recoveries, which is just as important. So anywhere between 70 to 80 percent recoveries on that as well. So, like it really ticks all the boxes. We're talking about a very big deposit, it's got scale, it's got grade, it's outcropping at surface, you know, shallow mining, open pit style mineralization, plus really good metallurgy. So, tick, tick, tick any day of the week on this project.

Andrew Musgrave

And now on the iron side, your drop tower test showed 74% of the product reported to a durable lump fraction at around 60% iron. So, for listeners who don't know the term, what does direct ship ore actually mean? And why does that lump result matter commercially?

Brendan Cummins

Look, it's very valuable. Anything that has DSO linked to it being direct ship ore means that you're effectively mining it and for iron ore, it's crushing it and screening it, and then it's ready to put on a truck, send to port and sell. So, you don't have complicated flow sheets, you don't have complicated processing. It is literally just dig it up, crush it, and screen it, and then sell it. So, the beauty of that is it's obviously a capex reduction as well because you don't need complicated infrastructure on site, but also the OPEX, the operating cost is very low because you're doing very simple mining and screening and haulage. We actually are quite fortunate that Wandanya has DSO manganese grades as well. So, in the ground, there's already manganese over 40% over quite large areas and so that's definitely an option to do a DSO project for that. So, like I I'm just amazed at how well this project is coming together for the company.

Andrew Musgrave

Now, the maiden mineral resource estimate is on track for completion by the end of Q3 2026 with a scoping study to follow in Q4. What inputs are still being finalised before that resource can be locked in?

Brendan Cummins

Oh, look, the maiden mineral resource, I'm super excited about it. You know, we've done several drill programs now over about two years. So, to actually culminate that in to get a number in terms of tons and grade is going to be you know a really exciting time for the project. And it's a serious milestone for any project as well. And what we hope to demonstrate is really to show the scale of that mineralization that we have discovered for both the iron and also the manganese at Wandanya. That's underway. We've got consultants actually doing that at the moment, and we're just progressing through all the data, so that's you know fully locked away. Now we just wait till the hopefully get it done by the end of September. So that's not too far away, another five, six weeks. And then with the scoping study, the scoping study is a plus or minus 35% financial evaluation. So, we're getting all the key inputs from that. And we sort of through the test work we've done, we'll be able to put down some rough capex, some capital that is required to go and build the project and sort the infrastructure camps and processing equipment and so forth. And then with the OPEX as well, we're looking at mining costs, trucking costs, general operating costs in order for us to produce the product. So we are gathering those inputs, and then once we've got the maiden mineral resource, then we run that through the optimizations, and then we look at our pit designs, and then we also look at the mine schedule and try to generate the best value in terms of mine sequencing and producing the highest quality products that we can, particularly early in the mine life in the first five years, to really you know generate early cash flow and generate good returns for our investors and shareholders, of which I'm one. So, I'm quite motivated to really see this through.

Andrew Musgrave

And just touching on the financials, cash in bank at the end of the quarter was 7.8 million with no debt. With the rig back out in August, the middle resource estimate during September, and the scoping study in Q4, how comfortable are you with the funding runway to get through these milestones?

Brendan Cummins

Oh, look, that amount of money is 7.8 million for any smaller company is substantial. You know, we've run the company for the last five years on the smell of an oily rag. You know, in total we've raised $23 million since the IPO. So that includes the $5 million we raised at the IPO. And we still have around 7.8 of that in the bank at the end of the June quarter. So, we're extremely frugal. We've made discoveries, and we've got enough money in the bank now to certainly push way through the scoping study and enter into feasibility next year. So, it's very comforting to know that we've got money in the bank to continue. So, it also takes away the overhang of investors worrying about you know, Black Canyons going to have to go and raise money. We're very solid, we have a very solid financial foundation at the moment.

Andrew Musgrave

And finally, Brendan, for someone looking at Black Canyon for the first time, what are some of the catalysts they should keep an eye out for over the next 12 months?

Brendan Cummins

I really think investors should be looking at value. You know, manganese is worth twice as much as iron ore. We've seen a huge iron ore boom over the last 20 years, I'd say, but in terms of manganese, it's really flown under the radar. There are only two other manganese mines in Australia: there's Woodie Woodie and Groot Island, and they've been around for 20 years each. And there's always talk of those operations shutting down. So, to be positioned where we are with a new discovery, you know, working through scoping, working through feasibility in the background. We're looking at permitting and approvals. I think it's only a matter of time before investors realize that, you know, we're going to be building a mine up here in the Eastern Pilbara for this manganese and iron ore deposit. So, keep an eye out for the mineral resource that's coming up, the scoping study by the end of the year, which I think will really be a better guide on the value of what we've discovered at Wandanya.

Andrew Musgrave

All right, Brendan. Well, it's great to have you on the podcast today. So, thanks for your time, and we look forward to further updates in the upcoming months.

Brendan Cummins

All right. Thanks, Andrew.

Andrew Musgrave

That concludes this episode of ASX Briefs. Don't forget to subscribe, and we look forward to catching you on our next episode.