Venture Minerals hopes to home in on promising nickel and copper targets south of Perth as market darling Chalice Mining gears up to begin ground and aerial surveys at the joint venture’s South West project.
Chalice has begun electromagnetic surveys of the project to delineate two nickel-copper-PGE targets found earlier in the year and also find more drill targets.
The surveys are probing the Balingup metamorphic belt that sits 240km south of Perth and hosts the headline Thor target which has been compared by the duo – in looks only at this stage – to Chalice’s bonanza Julimar deposit northeast of Perth.
Chalice will also undertake infill soil sampling to better define Thor under the latest tranche of works.
The project is 51 per cent owned by Chalice and 49 per cent by Venture, with the former set to up its stake to 70 per cent through a $2.5m outlay by 2024.
Venture Minerals, Managing Director Andrew Radonjic said: “This phase of exploration by Chalice will also begin to test the underexplored northern part of the 20km long Thor Target, the newly interpreted parallel unexplored ultramafic unit west of Thor and a new area at the Odin Nickel-Copper-PGE prospect.”
Thor’s 20km magnetic anomaly returned a 2.4m massive sulphide averaging 0.5 per cent copper, 0.05 per cent nickel and 0.04 per cent cobalt from its maiden drill program in 2019.
The project’s second prospect, Odin has intersected nickel and copper sulphides amid a 10km strike zone.
Dubbed a Julimar lookalike by Chalice due to its strikingly similar electromagnetic anomaly reading, Thor sits a stone’s throw from an 86m wide historic drill hole which showed promising disseminated sulphides and anomalous PGE mineralisation.
Chalice’s Julimar deposit northeast of Perth was in 2021 hailed as the largest nickel sulphide find in two decades.
It boasts 1.9 million tonnes of nickel equivalent and 17 million ounces in palladium equivalent.
The find turned Chalice into a COVID-era market runner, with shares bolting from 11c to $4.30 by the end of 2020 and peaking at $9.66 in late 2021. The price has cooled off this year to about $5.50.
Whilst there is much debate about nickel price forecasts over the coming year, the battery metal has been among the strongest performers in 2022, trading at a near-30 per cent premium of US$25,560 compared to December 2021.
Meanwhile, copper supply is widely tipped to experience a significant shortfall as it tries to meet the insatiable appetite of eco-conscious industries.
Whilst it remains early days in this fledgling partnership with Chalice, Venture will be hoping the South West project is a case of looks like Julimar, smells like Julimar, is like Julimar.
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By Matt Birney
