Doug Bright

ABx Group is confident its subsidiary Alcore will achieve substantially-enhanced fluorine recovery after incorporating new equipment to deliver the ideal feed particle size for its reactor to handle. The company is awaiting results from a fourth phase of testwork after a ball mill and an ultrasonic vibrating screen were used to prepare a narrower range of particle sizes for feed material.

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.

Lindian Resources has revealed high-grade rare earths running up to 7.15 per cent TREO at its enormous Kangankunde project in the African country of Malawi following a geological mapping and sampling campaign. The company says its most recent work shows that outcropping carbonatite prospects both north and south of the project are highly mineralised with rare earths.

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.

Alma Metals has extended the higher-grade copper-molybdenum mineralisation strike at the Central Zone within its Briggs project in Queensland to about 500m, with new drill hits including 161m at 0.29 per cent copper and 71ppm moly from 22m. The intercept is part of a longer 242.4m zone beginning just 5.4m from surface and running 0.26 per cent copper and 60ppm moly.

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.

GreenTech Metals has produced grades of up to 2.36 per cent lithium oxide from drilling and sampling of its pegmatites in Western Australia’s West Pilbara region – along strike from Azure Minerals’ giant Andover lithium discovery. Andover has an exploration target estimate in the range of 100 to 240 million tonnes at grades between 1 and 1.5 per cent lithium oxide.

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.

A second round of testwork on Surefire Resources’ breakthrough pre-treatment metallurgy has lifted the direct vanadium recovery from its Victory Bore magnetite resource in Western Australia to 97 per cent. The company says its proprietary method alleviates the vanadium industry’s standard needs for high-pressure treatment or high-temperature roasting of pre-treated magnetite and brings significant capex and opex advantages.

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.

Aruma Resources is putting its shoulder to the wheel to expand the gold and rare earths footprint at its Salmon Gums project in Western Australia’s Eastern Goldfields region after completing a 63-hole air-core drilling program. The campaign included 39 holes targeting rare earths, with the other 24 drillholes following up previous drilling to assess gold-bearing lodes at the company’s Thistle gold discovery.

Altech Batteries is getting closer to producing its Cerenergy solid-state battery pack that uses ordinary table-variety salt following an upgrade which has transformed its previously small trial batteries up to a 60kWh capacity. The upgrade came after Altech established a strategic joint venture with Germany’s Fraunhofer IKTS, which had initially developed battery packs with 5kWh and 10kWh capacities for testing.

An immune system protein being developed by Radiopharm Theranostics has for the first time been shown to have the potential to detect and target a specific cellular marker found in a wide range of cancers. The company’s monoclonal antibody known as “DUNP19”, is a first-in-class therapy designed to track down, image and destroy cancer cells in human patients.

Larvotto Resources’ $8m acquisition of the Hillgrove project in NSW comes with a million ounces of gold, Australia’s biggest antimony resource, gold-laced tailings and a mothballed processing plant and exploration package that has soaked up $200m. The project was put on the chopping block by administrators when Red River Resources experienced a fall-of-ground event at its Thalanga base metals mine in Queensland and never recovered.

Red Metal Ltd’s “metallurgy-first” approach to defining the potential of its unusual rare earths discovery in Queensland has paid early dividends, with tests showing extraction levels of up to 90 per cent on two key elements. Its Sybella project represents a potentially new deposit style for Australia – and possibly the world – with its rare earths hosted by partly weathered and fresh granite extending through a 12km-by-3km area.

DiscovEx Resources’ joint venture partner Carnaby Resources has drilled a high-grade intercept of 4m running a grade of 7 per cent copper at their Greater Duchess copper-gold project in Queensland. The latest hit is included in a longer intercept from the Duchess Central Lode of 10m going 3.3 per cent copper and 0.1g/t gold, with the steeply-dipping mineralised structure remaining open at depth.

Buxton Resources says a second diamond drillhole into the Dogleg prospect it shares with IGO in Western Australia’s West Kimberley region has thrown up a 2.89m hit going 4.17 per cent nickel and 0.83 per cent copper from 233.63m. The hole drilled by IGO, Buxton’s ASX 100-listed joint venture partner, also reported 0.14 per cent cobalt in the same intercept.

Buxton Resources’ growing union with mining giant IGO has set up the company for a big 2024, with the latter pumping in $579,000 to help fund a new exploration campaign at their Copper Wolf joint venture project in Arizona. It comes on the back of a busy financial quarter where Buxton also advanced its Graphite Bull and Quick Shears projects in Western Australia.

DiscovEx Resources says three reverse-circulation drillholes for 702m completed recently within its Sylvania project near Newman in Western Australia intersected banded iron mineralisation grading up to 48.2 per cent iron. The maiden drilling program was undertaken by Rio Tinto Exploration under the terms of DiscovEx’s Sylvania iron ore option agreement with the company. The longest intercept was 88m going 34.5 per cent iron.

Venus Metals Corporation says it has discovered petalite mineralisation assaying up to 4.6 per cent lithium oxide in multiple pegmatites at its Deep South prospect at Youanmi in Western Australia’s Murchison region. Petalite is an important ore mineral of lithium and the new pegmatite discoveries comprise several small outcrops up to about 60m across that are scattered through a 450-square-metre footprint.

Minerals exploration and development company GreenTech Metals has suddenly found itself next to a new power-play among lithium giants right next door to its own developing West Pilbara lithium project in Western Australia. Significant corporate activity is targeting the region, including global lithium giant SQM’s joint venture (JV) with Novo Resources and separately, SQM and Hancock Prospecting’s $1.7 billion bid for Azure Minerals.

Alma Metals has revealed a new 32.8m diamond drill hit of 0.78 per cent copper mineralisation across the contact between the granodiorite intrusion and enclosing volcanics at its Briggs project in Queensland. The hole tested the south-eastern margin of the Briggs Central resource zone and management says it further validates its concept of elevated copper grades in the near-surface zone straddling the two rock types.

Surefire Resources has developed a “breakthrough” metallurgical process which has yielded extraction rates of 91 per cent vanadium and 88 per cent titanium from its Victory Bore magnetite concentrate in WA’s Midwest. The company says its provisionally patented technology alleviates the need for standard vanadium industry pre-treatment processing and will be incorporated into its developing Victory Bore operations where its economic, operational and environmental benefits will be evaluated.

Larvotto Resources has kicked off a 2000m diamond drilling program to test previous high grade gold intercepts at its recently acquired 100 per cent owned Hillgrove project, 23km east of Armidale in NSW. Drilling will focus on the Bakers Creek area, which was the first locality opened up in the Hillgrove area by miners in 1877 who concentrated on the extraction of gold rather than the accompanying antimony.

Askari Metals says its first exploration licence has been granted at the company’s Yarrie lithium project, just 100km east/north-east of Pilbara Minerals’ giant 214.2 million tonne Pilgangoora lithium resource. The entire project area comprises nine contiguous exploration licences which enclose a total of 1711 sq kms across ground adjacent to and along strike from other significant hard rock pegmatite-hosted lithium deposits.

ABx Group has revealed high grade critical rare earths in drilling at its Wind Break prospect, only 15km northeast of the company’s 52 million tonne Deep Leads-Rubble Mound rare earths resource in Tasmania. Seventeen of the holes yielded samples where more than 4.5 per cent and up to 6.7 per cent of the total rare earth oxide content is made up of the more lucrative heavy rare earths dysprosium and terbium.

Venture Minerals has wound up stage one resource drilling at its 40 sq km, large-scale, clay hosted Jupiter rare earths prospect, 80km south-west of Mt. Magnet in WA’s Mid-West region. The project previously threw up some eye-watering results including 32m at 1629ppm TREO from 22m including 16m at 2397ppm TREO and a further 2m at an eyebrow-raising 7367ppm TREO from 36m.

Infinity Mining has tabled a maiden resource estimate of 60,300 ounces of gold and an exploration target estimate for its Central Goldfields project in WA’s Leonora gold district. The exploration target points to the scale of potentially discoverable mineralisation in just two of the company’s prospects and is between 116,000 and 592,000 ounces of gold with a significant grade range of between 2.2 and 3.7 grams per tonne gold.

Larvotto Resources has finished a metallurgical auger drill program to determine just how much gold, tungsten and antimony was left behind in tailings from mining campaigns dating back to the eighties at its Hillgrove project in NSW. Encouragingly, old records show gold averaging 1.34 grams per tonne and plenty of tungsten was shipped into the 1.4m tonnes of tailings during historic antimony mining.

Alma Metals has expanded the Briggs, Mannersley and Fig Tree Hill joint venture it shares with Canterbury Resources in central Queensland after grabbing two new exploration permits adjacent to the project. The JV ground includes the Briggs porphyry copper-molybdenum deposit that contains an inferred mineral resource of 415 million tonnes at 0.25 per cent copper and 31ppm molybdenum.

Senior geologists from giant Chinese battery raw materials supplier Huayou Cobalt have made a snap visit to Namibia to assess Askari Metals’ trenching and channel sampling progress at its Uis lithium project. Huayou, a major supporter and key strategic and technical partner of Askari, is listed on the Shanghai Stock Exchange with a market capitalisation of about US$12.8 billion (AU$19 billion).

Mercedes Benz has put in a $30.7 million purchase order for Neometals’ JV company Primobius to build a hydrometallurgical “hub” to complete the motoring giant’s new lithium-ion battery recycling plant in the German town of Kuppenheim. The order continues a growing relationship between Primobius and Mercedes and includes the fabrication, installation and commissioning of the innovative plant.