Matt Birney

Delecta Limited has exercised its option to acquire the Highline cobalt-copper project in Nevada, USA, after completing due diligence that confirmed the high-grade nature of its mineralisation. The company plans to carry out detailed geological mapping and sampling over the western claim and the Highline Mine area to identify drill targets.

Venus Metals Corporation has uncovered two promising boxwork gossans at its DeGrussa North copper project, located just 3km north of Sandfire Resources’ high-grade DeGrussa copper mine in WA’s Meekatharra mining district. Assays results for the rock and soil samples collected from the gossans are expected to be received in about two weeks.

Lithium Australia has concluded an exploration program of geological mapping, rock chip sampling and geochemical soil sampling over high grade lithium mineralisation identified last year at its Medcalf prospect, located southwest of Norseman in WA. The company previously unearthed the swarm of spodumene rich pegmatites with rock chip samples up to 7.15% lithium oxide in outcrops covering an area of 250m wide by 500m long.

Bellevue Gold has upgraded the inferred resources at its namesake project northwest of Leinster, WA, by 47% to 4Mt @ 11.8g/t gold for 1.53 million ounces of contained gold, just months after hitting the million ounce mark. Drilling is continuing at the very high-grade Viago Lode and Western Corridor and the company expects to release another mineral resource upgrade in the second quarter of this year.

European interest in lithium chemicals could benefit Infinity Lithium and its planned San Jose project, which aims to mine and refine lithium hydroxide for the European market. This includes the active support from the European Investment Bank for European lithium raw materials and refining projects to strengthen the strategic position of the European Union’s lithium-ion battery and electric vehicle sectors.

Hot Chili has executed a binding MoU for an option to acquire a 100% interest in Chilean mining group SCM Carola’s Vallenar landholdings, that are adjacent to the company’s Productora and El Fuego copper assets in Chile. The new “Cortadera” tenements hold a significant copper-gold porphyry discovery which contains extraordinarily wide, high grade, drill intersections of copper/gold mineralisation never publicly released before.

TNG Ltd has appointed mining veteran John Elkington as its Non-Executive Chairman as it proceeds with the financing and developing of its Mount Peake vanadium-titanium-iron project in the Northern Territory. Rex Turkington has stepped down as the company’s interim Chairman and remains on the board as a non-executive director.

Sovereign Metals has raised $4.3m through a share placement priced at 6.5c per share to accelerate the definitive feasibility study for its Malingunde flake graphite project in Malawi and additional metallurgical and exploration activities for the recently identified rutile potential. The company will also raise up to an additional $1m through a share purchase plan for existing shareholders.

Caravel Minerals has confirmed a new geological and structural model for the Bindi deposit, located near Perth in WA, by drilling multiple new zones of copper sulphide mineralisation up to 200m wide at its namesake project. The company is updating the mineral resource model and an updated mineral resource estimate for the project is expected later this quarter, incorporating all the new geology and assay data.

Pilbara conglomerate gold theorist, Novo Resources, has generated encouraging gold recoveries of up to nearly 90% from ore sorting trials at its Comet Well project located near Karratha in WA. The trials produced ore grades up to 792.4g/t in sorted gold concentrates and additional work will now be undertaken at smaller crush sizes and on oxidised ore samples to optimise gold recoveries even further.

MGC Pharmaceuticals’ botanic division has achieved a significant milestone with its Czech Republic greenhouse delivering 700kg of cannabis biomass in 2018, up 30% from the previous year. The company has also developed a new proprietary genetic strain of cannabis that contains over 35% THC and less than 1% CBD, allowing MGC to obtain more THC per kg of raw material to create cost effective medical cannabis products.

St George Mining has delineated two new nickel/copper targets at its Mt Alexander project, near Leonora in the northern Goldfields of WA. The Fairbridge prospect lies between the key Stricklands and Cathedrals prospects and is replete with surface gossans that returned impressive rock chip assays up to 1.23% nickel and 1.09% copper. The new West End prospect may contain buried sulphide mineralisation west of the existing Investigators prospect.

Calima Energy is set to rake in revenue of up to CAD$400,000 per year after bringing the Paradise oil well in northeast British Columbia back into production at a rate of between 16 and 20 barrels of oil per day. Revenue from the well will help pay for the company’s Canadian overheads, allowing it to focus on the high impact drilling program in the revered Montney oil and gas play.

Tyranna Resources is poised to divest its remaining 18.59% interest in the non-core Wilcherry JV gold project in South Australia to partner Alliance Resources for a tidy $1.5m in cash. The sale will allow the company to focus on its Eureka gold project near Kalgoorlie, WA, the Jumbuck gold project in South Australia and the Goodsprings cobalt and base metals project in Nevada, USA.

Anglo Australian will soon start its maiden exploratory RC drilling campaign at the Koongie Park gold project near Halls Creek in WA after receiving all site clearances to commence the field program. The company will target the Nicolsons East and Bulldog prospects, which lie in same prospective shear zone as Pantoro Limited’s Nicolsons underground gold mine, that reported a mineral resource of 393,000 ounces in May last year.

BlackEarth Minerals has unveiled an attractive set of numbers including post tax NPV at a 10% discount of USD$78.4m and IRR of 35.4% as part of the scoping study for its Maniry graphite project in southern Madagascar just 12 months after listing on the ASX. Capital costs for the first phase development has been estimated at USD$41m with payback expected in just 2.7 years.

Azumah Resources has generated an updated ore reserve estimate of 18 million tonnes grading 1.77g/t gold for just over 1 million ounces at its Wa project in Ghana. This represents a 65% increase in the ore reserves last reported in 2014 and underpins a feasibility study that presently shows an 11 year project life, producing about 100,000 ounces per annum in the first 6 years.

Tyranna Resources’ partner Alliance Resources has discovered a zone of gold anomalism from aircore drilling at the Weednanna East prospect of their Wilcherry JV project in South Australia. The magnitude and distribution of gold may be indicative of primary gold mineralisation and Alliance plans to carry out further drilling to better define the gold in regolith anomalies before carrying out bedrock drill testing.

Greenland Minerals has completed an optimised design for its proposed port facility to service the massive Kvanefjeld rare earths project in southern Greenland, allowing capital costs to be updated. The work by PND Engineers and China Communications Construction Co follows a revised design for the project’s plant and infrastructure delivered in late 2018 by Tetra Tech, which dramatically reduced civil earth working costs.

PharmAust has signed an agreement with US pharmaceutical heavyweight Elanco that allows the biotech company to reference certain safety and blood chemistry data that were generated for the regulatory approval of Monepantel in Australia, New Zealand and the EU, as an anti-parasitic drug in livestock animals. This could potentially expedite the early proof of principle phase two trials of the anti-cancer drug in dogs.

Kairos Minerals has uncovered additional gold anomalies over more than 10km strike at its emerging Croydon gold project, located near Port Hedland in the Pilbara region WA. Encouraging new assays up to 1.2g/t gold were returned from geochemical stream sediment sampling. The company is also reviewing a development pathway for its 643,000 ounce gold resource at the Mt York project, located 100km west of Croydon.

MGC Pharmaceuticals has completed the sale of its cannabis-based cosmetics business, MGC Derma, to CannaGlobal for a 10% stake in the private Canadian cannabis investment company. The company will now focus on its cannabis-based pharmaceutical products and deliver on its seed-to-pharma business model.

Southern Gold has confirmed narrow, high grade gold/silver mineralisation from an underground infill and extensional channel sampling program at its emerging Weolyu South epithermal precious metal project in South Korea. Results included 0.45m @ 30g/t gold and 1,280g/t silver and 0.55m @ 28.9g/t gold and 1,350g/t silver. A re-assay of 2017 samples also provided a significant 30% uplift in gold grades from the original analyses.

Calima Energy has spudded the second of two horizontal wells at its Canadian Montney oil and gas play that will be placed on extended production testing to assess the commerciality of its acreage. Successful testing of the Calima-2 and Calima-3 horizontal wells will allow the company to convert at least some of its resources from prospective to the higher confidence contingent level.

Venus Metals’ metallurgical testing of beneficiated oxide ores from the Youanmi project in WA, has shown that heated, sulphuric acid leaching produces recoveries near 80% of the contained vanadium pentoxide content, whilst rejecting 40% of the waste materials. Further work is underway to optimise the process flowsheet for the scoping study and Venus is presently updating the Youanmi mineral resource estimate.

Upstart telco Vonex continues to steadily build its cloud based PABX telephony business with the company reaching a record of 26,000 registered users as at 25 January 2019. This is up 22% from the 21,000 users it had a year ago and is a key indicator of the company’s business development progress as it expands its reach to small and medium enterprises.

Tyranna Resources’ partner Alliance Resources has identified a new gold target within the Wilcherry JV project in South Australia after re-assaying historic iron ore drill samples. Better results from the re-analysis of drilling carried out by Ironclad Mining between 2008 and 2012 at the Weednanna North prospect included 8m @ 1.06g/t gold from 58m down-hole and 22m @ 0.34g/t gold from 42m.

Great Southern Mining has successfully completed metallurgical test work on oxidised ores from its flagship Mon Ami project in WA that showed up to 97% recovery of the contained gold. The work has confirmed that the ores are amenable to conventional cyanide leaching and gravity recovery techniques and that low reagent uptake and coarse grinding will likely result in low operating costs.

Blina Minerals ongoing due diligence work at the Maintirano copper project in western Madagascar continues to return encouraging results with eight samples returning more than 5% copper, including a sample that registered 37.5% copper and 33ppm silver. The company will now carry out airborne surveys to help locate additional vein systems as no modern exploration methods have been used at Maintirano to date.

Sovereign Metals has outlined the high grade potential of its titanium-rich rutile mineralisation in central Malawi, this week reporting significant assays from re-sampling of historical hand-auger drill holes located in two areas 40km apart. Nearly 80% of the holes contained significant titania mineralisation, with an average weighted grade of 1.89% titanium dioxide.

Hammer Metals has received some encouraging news at its Perentie project near Mt Isa in Queensland, with its first pass RC drilling campaign returning some high grade copper results. Notable results include 1m @ 4.21% copper and 0.13g/t gold from 75m down-hole at the Paddy B prospect and 2m @ 2.36% copper and 2g/t gold from 37m down-hole at the Trackside prospect.

Altech Chemicals continues to progress its high purity alumina project with the company securing the development order for the processing plant in Johor, Malaysia. Site establishment works have now commenced and will be followed by the stage 1 construction works such as the bulk earthworks, construction of retaining walls and a maintenance workshop.