Matt Birney

Hot Chili has delineated a potential fourth porphyry centre at its large Cortadera copper-gold discovery in central Chile, after securing further historical drill hole and geophysical data for the project area. This technical dataset has revealed a substantial, alteration-related outline some 4km long by 3km wide, which has all the markings of a potentially world-class gold-rich, porphyry copper system.

Vonex has reached the final stages of development for its game-changing Oper8tor aggregated communications app that connects multiple communication platforms such as Skype and Whatsapp in real time. The company plans to carry out third-party application unit testing and load testing from the week starting 17 June to ensure that the app performs as expected at scale before announcing a formal launch date.

Caravel Minerals expects copper concentrate from its namesake project in WA’s Wheatbelt region to be sought after by copper smelters due to the very low levels of impurities such as arsenic. The concentrate was produced using composite samples from the project and contained about 25% copper while other impurities such as cadmium, selenium, antimony and lead were well below typical threshold limits for smelters.

Australian Potash has made its thickest intersection of productive basal sands whilst drilling two production bores at its Lake Wells sulphate of potash, or “SOP”, project near Laverton, WA. The second bore intersected 62m of high-yielding sands in the target palaeochannel and has flowed brine at indicative rates above the project requirement of 15 litres per second.

King River Resources’ ongoing metallurgical test work for its giant Speewah specialty metals project in WA’s Kimberley region has successfully produced an iron oxide product assaying 67% iron with low contaminants. The work has also produced an intermediate titanium product assaying 80% titanium dioxide that the company will seek to upgrade using various purification methods.

Strike Energy has spudded its highly anticipated West Erregulla-2 well in the Perth Basin, WA, that is targeting up to 1.16 trillion cubic feet of gas in the primary target Kingia High Cliff and 7.2 million barrels of conventional oil in the Jurassic Cattamarra Coal Measures. The well, which is being drilled to a total depth of 5,200m, will also intersect a conventional gas target in the Basal Wagina sandstones.

Legend Mining has recorded encouraging multi-element geochemical assays from its latest infill aircore drilling of an EM anomaly at the Worsley prospect in the Fraser Range, WA. Best results included 28m @ 0.17% zinc and 1.37g/t silver from 40m down-hole, which incorporated a higher-grade section of 4m @ 0.71% zinc and 1.71g/t silver from 52m and may indicate proximity to a volcanogenic massive sulphide ore system.

Spectrum Metals’ Phase II drilling campaign at the Penny West project near Youanmi, WA, has returned top results of 1m @ 180.3 g/t gold from 206m down-hole and 11m @ 11.7g/t gold from 229m from the first holes drilled at the Penny North prospect. The results have already doubled the down-dip extent of the Penny North lode on this section while results are pending for two up-dip holes on the same drill section.

St George Mining has delineated five new, high priority exploratory drilling targets for base metal mineralisation along the Cathedrals Belt at its Mt Alexander project located near Leonora in the Goldfields region of WA. The new targets include three virtually unexplored regions at the West End and Bullets prospects and two strong responses located down-dip and along strike of the existing Investigators mineralisation.