Andrew Duffy

Toro Energy has moved quickly to take advantage of the recent price spike in global uranium prices announcing plans to freshen up a previously released scoping study over its Lake Maitland project eyeing off the possibilities of what the current 16-year high price above US$100 a pound could mean for the prospects of its uranium project near Wiluna in WA.

Toro Energy’s Wiluna uranium project may grow with the addition of ore from two of the company’s 100 per cent owned satellite deposits now being assessed as part of an extension study. Ore from the company’s Lake Way and Centipede-Millipede deposits, which are about 70km west of the project’s main Lake Maitland deposit, may add to the project’s already impressive financial metrics that predict a $100m a year EBITDA for 17.5 years.

Vanadium magnetite concentrate from Surefire Resources Victory Bore project will potentially be shipped to Saudi Arabia where it will be processed into vanadium-titanium-magnetite end products under a new agreement to be thrashed out between Surefire and Saudi based Ajlan & Bros Mining and Metals Company. The deal will also likely involve Ajlan investing directly into Victory Bore.

New seismic data has revealed that Triangle Energy may be sitting on a gushing 36 million barrels of oil and 535 billion cubic feet of gas as best-estimate prospective (P50) resources in the North Perth Basin. The company plans to drill-test two of its 12 new prospects that hold part of the volume, with wells kicking-off in the first half of this year.

In the next Bulls N’ Bears instalment on what made stocks jump in 2023, we look at Buxton Resources’ blistering start to last year with a 169 per cent share price jump on the back of graphite drill hits in Western Australia’s Gascoyne region. It went from 10.2c in early January to 27.5c the following month … and there was still more to come.

What made share prices rise in 2023? Bulls N’ Bears will take a look in the next few days, starting with Ardea Resources. Its stock jumped 162 per cent in a busy four days during the middle of last year on the back of a mineral resource upgrade and a mammoth prefeasibility study for its Goongarrie Hub nickel-cobalt deposits in Western Australia’s Goldfields region.

Neometals has revealed plans for its 50 per cent-owned subsidiary Primobius to deliver a fully-integrated hydrometallurgical refinery hub to Stelco, offering recycled battery metal products to the electric vehicle market. Primobius’ option to acquire up to a 50 per cent equity in the Stelco special purpose vehicle has been extended until June 30 in 2025 to align with the fully-integrated plant offer.

Reach Resources has added 16 new targets to its niobium-rare earths project in the highly-prospective Gascoyne battery metals province of Western Australia, about 260km east of Carnarvon, following soil assays. The company says a tenement-wide soils program at its Wabli Creek project threw up promising assays going 3860 parts per million total rare earth oxides (TREO), 2744ppm, 2425ppm, 2271ppm, 1976ppm and 1918ppm.

Legend Mining says seismic reprocessing and machine learning have boosted the exploration potential of its Rockford project within Western Australia’s rugged Fraser Range, about 250km east of Kalgoorlie. The new geophysical datasets suggest a depth extension of the Mawson nickel-copper-cobalt deposit that already has an indicated resource of 860,000 tonnes at 1.34 per cent nickel, 0.88 per cent copper and 0.08 per cent cobalt.