Matt Birney

Big River Gold has eliminated its outstanding debt and is now in a strong position to finalise the definitive feasibility study for its flagship Borborema gold project in Brazil later this year. The company is targeting a significant reduction in capital and operating costs with a higher-grade, low strip ratio, starter Stage 1 open-pit envisaged and gold prices now 15% higher than those used in last year’s optimisation study.

Legend Mining has commenced a detailed, ground-based EM geophysical survey over the Area D prospect of its Rockford project in the Fraser Range region of southern WA. The survey is being undertaken over the high-priority D5 conductor, where the company has already defined anomalous nickel-copper sulphide mineralisation and is designed to better constrain the target ahead of an upcoming diamond drilling program.

Vonex has gone from strength to strength since listing on the Australian Stock Exchange in June last year with the company now on track for a 30% increase in new customer sales year-on-year in the current quarter. The company expects sales growth to accelerate throughout the 2020 financial year while increased engagement with its social media indicates that Vonex’s brand awareness is growing rapidly.

TNG Limited has selected an optimised single-stage, 2 million tonne per annum operation for its Mount Peake vanadium-titanium-iron mine in the Northern Territory that will trim capital expenditure by $29m to $824m. The project is now estimated to deliver a life-of-mine net cash flow of $12.2 billion, pre-tax net present value of $2.8 billion and pre-tax IRR of 33% while capital payback is estimated at 2.8 years.

Strike Energy has increased the net pay zone within the Kingia sandstone conventional gas discovery by 17 metres to 58 metres after completing wireline logging at its West Erregulla-2 well in the Perth Basin, WA. Down-hole tools have indicated the Kingia reservoir as having pressures between 6,814 psia and 6,828 psia with good permeability of 102mD, which supports the potential for a significant recoverable gas resource.

Bellevue Gold continues to churn out the high-grade gold hits beneath its historical namesake mine near Leinster, WA, with diamond drilling outside the current resource area returning a peak intersection of 4.4m @ 62.4g/t gold in the new Deacon Lode. The company has also intersected high-grade gold of up to 1.1m @ 75.3g/t gold from 654.6m at the newly discovered Mavis Lode that runs parallel to the Deacon Lode.

According to a recent technical report for Reedy Lagoon’s Burracoppin magnetite deposit located near Merredin, WA, the project’s iron ores could be upgraded into a high-grade concentrate, suitable as a feed product for the HIsmelt process that generates high-value “pig” iron. The company is proposing to complete drilling at the Burracoppin project to supplement historical work and then generate a JORC-compliant mineral resource.

Hammer Metals has discovered the new Shadow zone of copper-gold mineralisation at the Mt Philp Breccia Complex in Queensland’s Mount Isa mining district with rock chip sampling returning up to 4.64 grams per tonne gold and 27.7% copper. The company plans to carry out further mapping and sampling of the new area, which has been delineated over a 200m strike and is up to 50m wide.

Strike Energy is preparing to start the key controlled drawdown phase that could increase gas production at its Jaws-1 super-deep coal seam gas well in the Cooper Basin, South Australia. Water flow rates at the well have declined from 450 barrels per day in late June to the current 350 barrels per day while the Jaws and Klebb wells have exhibited strengthening gas flares as production rates slowly build.