Visible Gold Discovery Sparks Fresh Interest in Expanding Canadian Resource

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Tuesday, June 16, 2026

Gold exploration continues to draw investor attention as rising metal prices push companies to revisit established mining districts with modern techniques. In Canada's prolific Abitibi Greenstone Belt, new drilling campaigns increasingly target higher-grade zones that can materially expand existing resources and sharpen future project economics.

Shares of Emperor Metals Inc. (CSE: AUOZ) (OTCQB: EMAUF) move higher Tuesday after the company reported a significant high-grade gold intercept from its Duquesne West Gold Project in Quebec. The results land as Emperor advances a large-scale program designed to expand and refine the project's growing resource base.

Drill hole DQ26-20 returns 15.0 meters grading 61.5 grams per tonne (g/t) gold, including an exceptional 2.4-meter interval grading 369.6 g/t gold. That high-grade core sits inside a broader mineralized halo measuring 35.8 meters at 26.0 g/t gold. Visible gold appears in multiple zones throughout the intercept, a feature management views as an increasingly important driver of the deposit's upside.

The result supports Emperor's objective of advancing the conceptual Main Pit toward a multi-million-ounce gold deposit. Duquesne West currently hosts an inferred resource of 26.9 million tonnes containing roughly 1.46 million ounces of gold at 1.69 g/t.

DQ26-20 also outperforms history. The hole sits about 35 meters down plunge of a 1995 Santa-Fe Canadian Mining hole that returned 16.0 meters of 20.9 g/t gold, roughly tripling that grade across similar thickness.

Ongoing drilling expands the deposit footprint eastward while identifying both higher-grade shoots and broader bulk-tonnage material. Hole DQ26-36 returns 1.5 meters grading 7.9 g/t gold alongside a wider 28.0-meter interval grading 0.5 g/t gold, the kind of low-grade tonnage that can improve stripping ratios and add flexibility under a future open-pit scenario.

CEO John Florek calls visible gold one of the least understood yet potentially most significant aspects of the evolving Duquesne West story. He notes that recent drilling continues to demonstrate strong grades alongside the growing scale of the mineralized system.

The current assays represent only a portion of the broader effort. Emperor has reported results from 18 of 49 holes drilled, roughly one-third of the total assays expected from the combined 2025-2026 campaign. The program pairs more than 15,000 meters of new drilling with 8,000 meters of historical core resampling, adding some 23,000 meters of data toward refining the geological model.

In Tuesday trading, shares of AUOZ climb 22.5% to C$0.245, while EMAUF gains 19.7% to $0.1735.

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