Public Company News

Neometals will bank another $104m from the final equity sell down of its founding stake in the Mt Marion lithium mine near Coolgardie. The sale takes Neometals’ total equity and dividend return from the project to an incredible $200m from an original investment of just $3m. The company’s co-shareholders in the project, Mineral Resources and Chinese company Ganfeng Lithium will pay about $51.9m each to become 50/50 co-owners.

ASX listed heavy rare earths producer Northern Minerals has now reached practical completion at its Browns Range pilot plant project, located near Halls Creek in the East Kimberley region of WA. The company said that commissioning of the plant was progressing well and that rare earth carbonate product from ore processing is being stockpiled ahead of the first shipment, which is expected by the end of the year.

Artemis Resources has delineated a new shallow, indicated mineral resource of 1.15Mt @ 0.52% nickel, 0.73% copper and 277ppm cobalt at its Radio Hill nickel mine near Karratha in WA. Management said more work is required in 2019 to determine the best way to monetise the project, which is located just 400m from the existing Radio Hill processing plant.

Pilbara conglomerate gold theorist Novo Resources has generated rich concentrates from ore sorting trials at its Comet Well project near Karratha, producing ore grades up to 792.4g/t gold. The company also separated coarse gold nuggets from gravelly ore horizons at its Egina project near Port Hedland using gravity techniques and it has suggested that the procedure could be ramped up to a larger scale in the future.

Legend Mining has identified two significant new bedrock conductors at the Shackleton prospect within its Rockford Project in the revered Fraser Range that may be prospective for VMS mineralisation. The company plans to carry out RC and diamond drilling to test the Shackleton 1 conductor and carry out further surveying over this trend in 2019.

St George Mining has intersected a 5.25m drill intersection going 6.95% nickel, 2.67% copper, 0.23% cobalt and 3.1g/t palladium plus platinum from 185m down-hole at its Investigators prospect near Leonora in WA. Another impressive 8.49m long intersection in a separate hole showed 5.78% nickel, 2.64% copper, 0.18% cobalt and 3.61g/t palladium plus platinum from 183.9m down-hole. The impressive results continue to extend the mineralised footprint at the prospect.

Vonex has reported its highest ever monthly customer billings of $741,000 in November, a year‐on‐year growth of more than 13%, largely due to the market disruption caused by the continued rollout of the NBN in metropolitan areas and the start of its online marketing campaign across Australia. The company has also grown the number of registered cloud based PBAX users by 26% year‐on‐year to 25,800.

Aurora Labs has formed an equal joint venture with leading Australian mining services and engineering group, WorleyParsons, to provide 3D printing services to the oil and gas, mining and major infrastructure industries. This will allow the company to offer its innovate 3D printing technology and expertise to existing and new clients of WorleyParsons.

Metalicity Limited is now geared for exploration at its prospective new copper project tenements in the highly sought after Paterson region in WA, after netting nearly AUD$1.5m from the sale of non-core lithium and cobalt assets. The company’s Pilbara lithium project was sold to Chilean major SQM for AUD$1.35m and a royalty, whilst its Yerrida cobalt project was purchased by Great Western Exploration for $170,000 in cash and shares.

88 Energy has received strong interest in the farm-out of its conventional oil play at its Project Icewine in Alaska’s famed North Slope oil province and has extended its deadline for offers to the first quarter of 2019. The company is also carrying out lab tests and other studies to better understand its unconventional HRZ shale before starting farm-out proceedings next year.

Hammer Metals has generated its maiden mineral resource for the Jubilee deposit near Mount Isa in Queensland, defining 1.4 million tonnes grading 1.41% copper and 0.62g/t gold. The project is of a similar size and mineralisation style to other copper-gold deposits successfully mined by small-scale open pit operations elsewhere in the district, providing the company some confidence that Jubilee may be economically extracted in the future.

Strike Energy continues to achieve greater continuous flows of gas from its super-deep Jaws-1 coal seam gas well in the Cooper Basin, South Australia, as more coal enters the critical desorption window. Water production has also remained steady which is an indicator that continued fluid recovery will lead to more gas production growth.