Altair Minerals, the Australian-listed exploration company, has begun a 75,000-metre drilling programme at its Greater Oko landholding in Guyana, backed by an estimated $38 million in cash reserves. The 18-month campaign marks a shift for the company from preliminary geochemical work to a multi-rig drilling effort across five target districts.

Company leadership said the programme's central aim is to identify large-scale gold deposits within the Greater Oko site, which sits in the Guiana Shield, a geological formation with characteristics comparable to the Birimian Greenstone Belt in West Africa. Unlike that West African belt, the Guiana Shield remains relatively underexplored, a point Altair has cited as part of the rationale for its expanded investment.

The drilling is split between reverse circulation and diamond methods, with allocations concentrated across three primary zones. South Oko accounts for the largest share of the programme, with 45,000 metres planned across 20,000 metres of diamond drilling and 25,000 metres of reverse circulation drilling. This area has been the focus of recent soil sampling, which identified saprolite pits, a feature geologists often link to nearby primary gold sources.

North Peters, the second zone, will receive 15,000 metres of drilling, split between 10,000 metres of diamond drilling and 5,000 metres of reverse circulation work. The initial diamond drilling there is intended to confirm historical high-grade gold zones and establish the structural controls that influence mineralisation in the district. A further 15,000 metres has been allocated to regional targets outside the two main zones, again divided 10,000 metres to diamond drilling and 5,000 metres to reverse circulation.

Supporting the expanded drilling effort, Altair has added two new reverse circulation rigs to its fleet and converted an older rotary air blast rig to reverse circulation capability. The company said this change would allow deeper penetration into the ground, reduce sample contamination and improve daily drilling rates compared with the equipment previously in use.

On-site infrastructure has also grown. Accommodation at the South Oko and North Peters camps has been expanded, and three new regional field camps have been established to support work beyond the two main target areas. Staffing has increased by around 20 field personnel, along with two senior geologists who bring prior experience in the Oko district specifically. The company's heavy machinery fleet has been expanded as well, to support access routes and site preparation across the wider drilling area.

Beyond South Oko and North Peters, Altair is progressing exploration at three further regional districts: Kmung, Mara-Mara and East Puruni. Each has produced historical intercept data and stream sediment anomalies that the company regards as encouraging, positioning them as secondary targets that may draw further drilling attention depending on results from the current programme.

To support mapping across the wider licence area, Altair will also carry out a LiDAR aerial survey covering 400 square kilometres. The data gathered is intended to help the technical team map geological structures, historic alluvial fields and access routes, informing how future drilling targets are selected once results from the current campaign are assessed.

The programme comes as corporate activity in the wider region has picked up, with several acquisitions and rising market capitalisations recorded among neighbouring mining companies operating in the Guiana Shield. Altair has not framed its own programme as a response to this activity, and the company's stated priority remains the execution of its current drilling schedule. It has said it expects to provide sequential updates on exploration results over the course of the 18-month programme, rather than a single consolidated report at the end of the campaign.

The scale of the investment, and the length of the drilling programme, mean that meaningful results are unlikely to emerge before several months of fieldwork have been completed, given the logistical demands of operating across camps in five separate districts.

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