White Cliff Minerals will focus its rare earths exploration on the company’s Hines Hill, Diemals and Lake Tay projects after the sale of its Yinnetharra lithium-rare earths project to ASX-listed Minerals 260.
The company will receive a total of seven million Minerals 260 shares and $100,000 cash for the sale of Yinnetharra in the Gascoyne region of WA. The transaction value of the deal comes to $2.445 million.
White Cliff argues the divestment of the Gascoyne project allows the company to maintain a vested interest in Yinnetharra through its shareholding in addition to the potential upside of Minerals 260’s other exploration projects.
Yinnetharra is within earshot of several operations including Hastings Technology Metals’ world-class Yangibana rare earths acreage and Arrow Minerals’ emerging Reid Well prospect where rock chip sampling has returned grades of up to 3.77 per cent lithium oxide.
White Cliff Minerals technical director Ed Mead said: “The transaction with MI6 is a great outcome for White Cliff. We maintain continued exposure to Yinnetharra and to exploration success by the MI6 team across their project portfolio.”
While the sale of Yinnetharra allows the company to focus on its three key rare earth projects it also continues to review other projects for potential divestment including its Reedy gold project and the Preston River lithium project.
In November the company concluded a maiden 49-hole, 1861m air-core drilling program at Hines Hill in WA’s Wheatbelt region. The campaign returned positive results including 3m at 1602 parts per million total rare earth oxides (TREO) from 6m.
The headline strike sat inside a larger 25m intercept running 837ppm TREO from a shallow depth of 6m and was joined by an almost equally impressive 4m parcel grading 1182ppm TREO from 45m.
Some of the longer results include a 36m interval grading 639ppm TREO from surface with a higher-grade 3m inclusion at 1126ppm TREO from 12m. Other results carved out in the campaign include 16m at 693ppm TREO from 24m and 12m going 637ppm from 42m.
At Diemals the company has also completed a 1104-piece geochemical sampling program, mobilising the specimens to an assay laboratory for detailed analysis. The project sits around 185km north of Southern Cross in an area once thought to be solely prospective for nickel, copper and gold mineralisation. However, recent analysis suggests the zone could host lithium and rare earths.
Meanwhile at the recently acquired Lake Tay rare earths project about 120km south-west of Norseman in Western Australia, White Cliff is looking to launch its maiden field program to follow up on some historical results.
A 2008 air-core drilling program by Magnetic Resources returned highly anomalous rare earth results including 4m at 1012ppm TREO at the site.
White Cliff says the Lake Tay project area is prospective for ionic clay-hosted rare earth mineralisation and is relatively under-explored.
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By Michael Philipps
