VIENNA, Austria – April 15, 2026 – Ekometall Inc. (“Ekometall” or the “Company”), through its wholly owned subsidiary, Ekometall Exploration GmbH, today announced the completion of its inaugural drill campaign at the Tessenberg target in East Tyrol, Austria. The three-hole, 500-meter program, completed in December 2025, marks the first exploration drilling in the Company’s history and establishes a repeatable permitting and operational framework applicable across Ekometall’s nearly 10,000 km² Austrian land package.
Highlights
- Drill permit approved in five months from application; full campaign completed from initial stakeholder engagement to final demobilization in under eight months, establishing a repeatable permitting and execution framework under MinroG;
- First drill program in Ekometall’s history successfully completed at Tessenberg, East Tyrol, drilling 500 meters across three holes;
- Program secured multi-year continuity of the Company’s legacy Panzendorf and Kelchalpe license areas, held continuously since 2021;
- Successful completion unlocks the Company’s ability to advance drill permitting across its broader Austrian portfolio;
- Best intercept returned 0.6% Cu over 1.5 meters (69.0 – 70.5m) in 25-TBG-003, with associated Zn, Pb, and Ag, suggesting an active mineralizing hydrothermal system within the phyllitic schist horizons at depth.
Ryan Finlay, CEO, commented: “This program was designed to answer a strategic question: can Ekometall efficiently permit and execute a drilling campaign in Austria? The answer is unequivocally yes. This operational result, with documentation, regulator relationships, and a repeatable framework now in place, is what positions us to advance exploration across our nearly 10,000 km² land package with confidence. The lessons from this structurally complex terrane will directly inform target selection and drill planning as we prioritize higher-conviction targets across the portfolio.”
Establishing the Operational Blueprint
The decision to drill Tessenberg in 2025, ahead of Ekometall’s broader license acquisition and ongoing large-scale historical data processing campaign, was deliberate. The program was designed to build critical operational knowledge: how to navigate the landowner consent processes, engage municipal stakeholders effectively, establish a strong working relationship with Energold Drilling, and navigate the drill permitting process under MinroG (Austrian Mineral Resources Act) along with the various environmental assessment and monitoring programs. Receiving drill permit approval in five months from application, after a single oral hearing and site inspection, and completing the full campaign from initial stakeholder engagement to final demobilization in under eight months, is a commercial result of genuine significance. Austria is broadly perceived by international mining capital as a difficult jurisdiction. Ekometall has now demonstrated otherwise with documentation, regulator relationships, and a repeatable framework in place.
Waiting for the completion of Ekometall’s license acquisition process and subsequent historical data processing would have delayed all of these milestones by at least a year, while also placing the Panzendorf and Kelchalpe license areas at risk of non-renewal.
Tessenberg 2025 Drilling Summary
Hole ID | X | Y | Z | Total Depth (m) | Azimuth (°) | Dip (°) |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
25-TBG-001 | 307,419.00 | 5,183,158.00 | 1,881.00 | 154.2 | 325 | -45 |
25-TBG-003 | 307,092.92 | 5,183,168.12 | 2,036.18 | 247.45 | 168 | -63 |
25-TBG-004 | 307,092.93 | 5,183,168.13 | 2,036.18 | 74.3 | 360 | -90 |
Six holes were permitted as part of this program, holes 25-TBG-001 through 25-TBG-006. Ekometall elected to drill holes 25-TBG-001, 25-TBG-003, and 25-TBG-004 in the interest of time as the drilling timeline approached end-of-year 2025.
Tessenberg Results: A Legacy Target
The Tessenberg target area has been part of Ekometall’s license portfolio since 2021 and represents a legacy target selected from historical records documenting past copper and base metal workings in the Panzendorf area of East Tyrol. The 2025 program was specifically designed to test two geophysical anomalies across the property – a magnetic high and a corridor of sulfide mineralization associated with historical mining activity, and to fulfill the minimum work obligations required to renew the Company’s underlying exploration licenses before year-end.
Three drill holes were completed across approximately 500 meters of total drilling. Holes 25-TBG-003 and 25-TBG-004 were completed in the center of the property, targeting the same geophysical anomaly corridor in section, and were sampled in their entirety and submitted to ALS for multi-element analysis.
The most significant result was returned in 25-TBG-003, which intersected 0.6% Cu (6,020 ppm) over 1.5 meters from 69.0 to 70.5 meters downhole, hosted in phyllitic schists with strong disseminated pyrite and associated Zn (857 ppm), Pb (283 ppm), and Ag (3.43 ppm) across the same interval. This intercept demonstrates that a mineralizing hydrothermal system was active at Tessenberg and that metal bearing fluids accessed the phyllitic schist horizons at depth.
Structural Complexity and Core Recovery
Ekometall notes that the highly deformed, Alpine metamorphic terrane at Tessenberg presented certain drilling challenges. The phyllitic and schistose host rocks exhibited pronounced foliation and fracturing, resulting in variable and at times low core recovery across portions of all three holes. These conditions are characteristic of the structurally complex Austro-Alpine basement rocks. The team exercised care in sample selection and assay submission protocols to ensure representative sampling where recovery permitted, and the Company’s geological interpretation has appropriately weighted those intervals with recovery constraints in drawing the conclusions above.
The structural environment encountered at Tessenberg is an important data point for planning future programs at Ekometall’s other license blocks, many of which sit in geologically distinct settings where better ground conditions and higher-priority targets are expected.
Advancing the Portfolio
Securing the renewals at Panzendorf and Kelchalpe maintains the continuity of Ekometall’s legal claim to the Tessenberg target area and preserves optionality to test additional targets, including the Gerichtsbachgraben area to the east and the western sector of the property, that were identified as warranting follow-up field prospection, guided by multi-criteria analysis (MCA) and AI-assisted remote sensing work.
Beyond Tessenberg, the completion of this program materially strengthens Ekometall’s position across its entire land package. The Company now enters 2026 with an established permitting track record, its recently completed US$1.25m financing in February 2026, a proven stakeholder engagement methodology, and an active partnership with GexplOre, which is advancing a comprehensive historical data-processing initiative across all of Ekometall’s licensed blocks.
With GexplOre’s data processing work progressing and the Company’s datasets continuing to mature, Ekometall expects to be positioned to advance drill permitting on prioritized targets across the portfolio, selected on the basis of far more rigorous modern analysis than was available when Tessenberg was originally staked.
Quality Assurance and Quality Control
Ekometall implemented a QA/QC protocol compliant with industry best practice for the Tessenberg drill program. All samples were collected from diamond drill core under the joint supervision of GexplOre and Ekometall, with core handling, orientation marking, recovery measurement, and geological logging carried out according to documented standard operating procedures.
Samples were shipped to ALS Romania, an ISO/IEC 17025:2017 accredited laboratory, with formal chain-of-custody documentation. Multi-element analysis was conducted using a four-acid digestion method with ICP-MS finish; fire assay with AAS finish was used for gold analysis on hole 25-TBG-003.
QA/QC control samples — comprising certified reference materials (CRMs sourced from OREAS, Perth), coarse blanks, and field duplicates — represented approximately 8% of the total sample batch. CRM results demonstrate good to excellent precision, with the majority falling within ±2 standard deviation limits of certified values and no results exceeding ±3 standard deviations. No systematic analytical bias or drift was identified. Blank samples returned values at or below detection limits with no evidence of contamination. Duplicate pairs show good coherence, indicating satisfactory sampling precision and reproducibility.
Overall, the QA/QC results support the reliability of the analytical dataset for geochemical interpretation and exploration targeting purposes.
About Ekometall
Ekometall is an emerging critical minerals exploration company focused on unlocking Austria’s significant precious and base metal potential across the country’s historic mining districts. The company has assembled a specialized, Austria-based technical team that applies AI-assisted analysis to digitize and interpret over five centuries of previously inaccessible geological records, transforming archival data into actionable exploration targets.
With a dominant first-mover land position approaching 10,000 km² and a demonstrated ability to efficiently permit and execute drilling programs, Ekometall offers global mining partners a compelling entry point into a favorable European jurisdiction. The company’s combination of local expertise, modern exploration methods, and extensive mineral tenure establishes Ekometall as the essential gateway for accessing the critical raw materials vital to Europe’s energy transition and industrial future.
For more information, visit ekometallgroup.com
Contact
For more information on Ekometall’s projects or for investor relations inquiries, please contact:
Ryan Finlay
Managing Director & CEO
e. rfinlay@ekometallgroup.com
m. +1 703 229 2312
