Matt Birney

King River Copper is forging ahead with its concept study for the Speewah vanadium project in the Kimberley. The company is investigating an innovative hydrometallurgical process to produce premium high grade vanadium pentoxide for direct sale. The study will incorporate relevant mining, beneficiation and processing costs to optimise a future open pit mining scenario for high grade mineralisation at the project

Southern Gold is now riding shotgun with Northern Star Resources after the multi-billion dollar miner took over Westgold’s South Kalgoorlie assets, including the Cannon underground mine. Southern said this week that its 5 year “right to mine” agreement with Westgold had been transferred to Northern Star and was unaffected by the transaction. The company will receive a revenue stream from Cannon this year.

It seems that Calidus Resources hits gold almost every time it sinks a drill bit into the Warrawoona gold project near Marble Bar with 12 recent RC holes now extending the gold mineralisation a further 2kms east of the known Klondyke resource. Field mapping has also revealed the gold-rich host rocks extend another 2km further east, adding even more weight to the company’s view it is on to a serious system.

Tests on lithium concentrates from the Mt Marion mine near Coolgardie have produced exceptionally high quality lithium hydroxide with a 99.99% purity, making a compelling case for part owner Neometals to move into downstream processing by making use of its off-take agreement with its partners. Neometals is planning to build a 10,000 tonne per annum lithium hydroxide plant for the off-take.

Terrain Minerals is finalising a 1000 metre RC program to drill a number of never-before-tested targets at its Red Mulga project in the Murchison. The exciting greenfields project will explore a previously unrecognised occurrence of ultramafic rocks on the margin of the Yilgarn Craton with potential for nickel, cobalt and precious metals. The frontier nature of the project will be of interest to others in the region.

Legend Mining has reported highly anomalous nickel-copper assays from an infill aircore drilling program at its Rockford project in the Fraser Range of W.A. The intersection of 14m @ 0.37% nickel and 0.43% copper from 72m depth is the most encouraging identified to date and contained visible sulphides in the same mafic intrusive that hosts the Nova-Bollinger deposit, 120km to the southwest.

The impending Vonex internet based telco float, backed by State One Stockbroking, will be fascinating to watch as the new ASX arrival muscles its way into big telco territory with its very own, in house, cloud based telephony technology. Every good float needs both a base load revenue story and a blue-sky pitch and Vonex certainly doesn’t disappoint in either department.

Nzuri Copper has appointed Lycopodium Minerals as its key engineering contractor for the Stage 1 Dense Media Separation plant at the Kalongwe copper-cobalt project in the DRC. Lycopodium was also retained for a Stage 2 economic assessment at the project. Nzuri are moving at a cracking pace now at Kalongwe which is in real danger of actually producing copper some time soon.

Things could move quickly for Geopacific after its DFS hits the streets in the third quarter of this year given that its Woodlark Island gold project in PNG is already sitting on a fully permitted and granted mining lease. The PFS was completed in March and showed a robust, 100,000 ounce a year, low cost, low stripping ratio open pit operation with an expected post tax 2 year payback.