Emperor Metals' latest assay release from Duquesne West in Quebec includes a 20.1-metre intercept grading 5.0 grams of gold per tonne, at a vertical depth of 375 metres. The interval sits inside a replacement-style lens — a broad zone where gold has replaced the surrounding rock — that the company says is more continuous and extensive than earlier, widely spaced drilling had shown.
Shares closed 22.55% higher at $0.3199, on dollar volume of about $938,000 across 523 trades.
Results are now in for 38 of the 66 holes drilled this season at Duquesne West. A substantial portion of the total expected assays — including work on previously unsampled historical core — has not yet been reported, according to the company's August 25 release. The programme is part of Emperor Metals' push toward a preliminary economic assessment, an early study of whether the deposit can be mined profitably.
The catch is that the intercepts being reported now sit partly outside the existing resource model. That model currently stands at 1.46 million ounces of gold at an average grade of 1.69 g/t, per a resource estimate published in July 2025. The company says the mineralised lenses the current programme is drilling are not fully captured in that figure — which means shareholders holding on the strength of the resource number are looking at a floor, not a ceiling, if the new holes hold up.
This batch also returned a 12.4-metre interval at 1.6 g/t and a 3.0-metre interval at 2.7 g/t pulled from previously unsampled historical core. The historical core work turned up visible free gold — flecks or grains large enough to see with the naked eye — something that had not previously been recognised at this project. The company says it is now systematically targeting the zones where that characteristic appears.
CEO John Florek said in the release that the results show "substantial thickness and grade" across several mineralised lenses and that a clearer understanding of the deposit's structure is allowing the team to drill these zones with greater precision.
More than half the programme's expected assays are still to come.