Rio Tinto has signed a binding farm-in and joint venture agreement with LCL Resources to acquire up to an 80% interest in the Liamu copper-gold project in Papua New Guinea (PNG).
LCL Resources’ Liamu project includes the Dada gold-copper porphyry discovery and the high-grade Ubei epithermal gold-copper prospect.
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This latest arrangement marks the second farm-in between Rio Tinto and LCL Resources in PNG, following a previous agreement on the Ono project announced in March 2026.
Under the terms of the agreement, Rio Tinto may earn an initial 51% interest by solely funding at least A$6m ($4.2m) of exploration, including a minimum of 3,000m of drilling, over a five-year period.
To increase its stake to 80%, Rio Tinto must either fund an additional A$40m of exploration or define a JORC-compliant mineral resource containing at least 1mt of copper or copper equivalent and complete a scoping study.
Initial exploration will focus on anomalous undrilled areas around the Dada discovery, where previous trench results included 96m at 0.41g/t gold and 19m at 0.43g/t gold and 0.16% copper at surface.
At Ubei, a review of future exploration will take place within the first 12 months, with earlier rock chip samples returning up to 367.7g/t gold and 4.29% copper.
LCL Resources will act as operator during the farm-in period and receive a management fee of up to 10% of the exploration expenditure.
Rio Tinto retains the right to become operator before any annual programme and can take over operational control if necessary.
The Liamu project is located under exploration licence EL2432, which sits in central mainland PNG, east-southeast of Port Moresby.
Both Dada and Ubei prospects have surface mineralisation but have not been subjected to drilling.
LCL Resources executive chairman Chris van Wijk said: “A second agreement with Rio Tinto is a strong endorsement of the quality of LCL’s PNG portfolio and of the groundwork our team has completed at Dada and Ubei.
“Dada shows the hallmarks of the upper levels of a gold-copper porphyry system, with stockwork veining exposed at surface over hundreds of metres and the causative intrusion yet to be found. Ubei hosts some of the highest-grade surface results in our portfolio, directly above a strong chargeability anomaly that has never been drilled.”
