Rugby Mining Limited reported that in response to the opening up of the Cobrasco copper-molybdenum project to exploration, including drilling, the Company will defer drilling of its Salvadora, Chile silver-copper project. The decision is based on three considerations: Current fieldwork at Salvadora is discovering new areas of mineralization that warrant evaluation and ranking prior to drilling; At this stage, the Cobrasco project is a more immediate and superior exploration opportunity; and For the present, personnel would have difficulty operating both projects simultaneously. Field reconnaissance will continue at Salvadora to evaluate potential drill targets through to the winter shutdown expected in May 2022.

The Company will provide an exploration update as results become available. On February 7, 2022, Rugby announced it will initiate a comprehensive exploration program at Cobrasco, a large-scale undrilled porphyry copper-molybdenum system in western Colombia. A community agreement and water permits are in place to proceed with the drilling, which could commence as early as June, provided Rugby is satisfied the forest can remain unaffected by the program.

The Company will announce its exploration plan and schedule as they are formulated. Detailed exploration at Cobrasco is facilitated by a January 28, 2022 resolution with respect to the Forest Reserve Extraction process in Colombia. It enables mineral exploration, including drilling, to proceed without going through the onerous forest extraction process, a process that amounted to a land-use change even before a project had proven to be viable.

In addition, the Resolution provides a clearer and better-focused process for future Forest Reserve Extractions in areas where the removal of the forest cannot be avoided. The Cobrasco Project: Colombia represents a “discovery gap” between major copper porphyry discoveries in Panama to the north and Ecuador-Peru-Chile to the south. Cobrasco was discovered in the 1980s through a joint German-Colombian Government (“BGR”) regional stream geochemical program which identified extensive and strongly anomalous copper stream sediment geochemistry which defined outcropping copper porphyry style mineralization.

Mineralization is hosted by a sequence of felsic tuffs, proximal to and immediately west of the contact with a number of syenite to monzonite intrusives. The previous exploration by the BGR indicates potential for an enriched supergene blanket containing chalcocite after bornite, cuprite, malachite and native copper. Molybdenite was also observed.

Alteration appears similar to other large porphyry copper systems where primary magnetite is replaced by hematite (martitization). Mineralized outcrops of stockwork quartz-bornite veining occur within the property. To date, no systematic modern exploration or drilling has been conducted on the 3,000-hectare property.