Doug Bright

Infinity Mining has topped up its total gold resource inventory to 63,000 ounces with the addition of a maiden 2700-ounce gold resource estimate from its Great Northern project at Leonora in Western Australia. The company has 10 mineral tenements in the Leonora district and is developing a portfolio of gold resources, with its eye on an initial 500,000-ounce target.

With uranium prices soaring globally, Toro Energy has reconfirmed its commitment to constructing its Lake Maitland pilot plant to test ores from three uranium-vanadium deposits within a radius of 110km south-west of Wiluna in Western Australia. The company says its recently-commissioned pilot plant will test improved beneficiation and hydrometallurgical circuits that it has developed from its bench-scale research.

Some old-fashioned detective work has set Terrain Minerals on a pathway to try and emulate Sirius Resources’ 2012 discovery of the hulking Nova-Bollinger deposit in WA’s Fraser Range. Terrain says its search through old geophysical records identified an intriguing “eye-shaped” feature near its ground similar to the one that led to the Nova-Bollinger base metals discovery – just 300km to the north on the same geological structure.

Valor Resources has ticked off a second item from its targeted triad of lithium targets in Canada’s booming Thunder Bay area in Ontario after completing its acquisition of the Jesaulenko project. Valor’s 100 per cent acquisition of Jesaulenko comes just days after it also grabbed the nearby Frazer Lake lithium project and an 80 per cent share of the Hook Lake uranium play in Saskatchewan.

Octava Minerals has the drill bit primed for a maiden nickel-copper-cobalt exploration program at its Yallalong project in Western Australia’s Mid West region, as part of a strategic collaboration with the CSIRO – the nation’s premier science agency. The campaign will test several significant anomalies identified through the CSIRO’s Kick-Start program, an initiative designed to assist innovative Australian start-ups and small-to-medium enterprises.

Gold Mountain has kicked off a new thrust into rare earths exploration at its Down Under project after amassing a giant land position of some 970 square kilometres in the prospective Jequie province in Brazil. The company has pegged its ground largely based on areas of anomalous thorium and uranium geochemistry, which is known to be associated with rare earths mineralisation in the province.

Valor Resources has secured the rights to acquire the 83-square-kilometre Frazer Lake lithium project in Canada’s Ontario province where pegmatite sampling has yielded 44m at 0.54 per cent lithium oxide. The company today revealed it had signed a definitive purchase option agreement to pick up Frazer Lake, which lies in the Thunder Bay region that has several significant lithium projects under development.

Meeka Metals’ mapping and sampling has highlighted what it believes is an important gold-arsenic anomaly within a 2km-long shear zone at its Murchison gold project, about 28km north-east of Meekatharra in Western Australia. Management says its surface geochemistry picked up the anomalism, which mapping shows as correlating with en echelon splays where previous drilling intersected grades of up to 54g/t gold.

Askari Metals says a detailed trench sampling campaign at its Uis project in Namibia has revealed a more significant lithium-rich pegmatite system than interpreted during initial mapping, with an average thickness of about 10m. The main pegmatite body has been mapped along a strike of about 2km and includes a south-west zone with an average thickness of 21m along 350m of strike.