Public Company News

Southern Gold has scored a bullseye with a new geological model for an area south of the historic Transfind pit, with first-pass drilling hitting gold in all 13 holes and producing a best result of 1m @ 133.67 g/t. The results have backed up hopes for shallow, very high-grade gold that could be trucked to a nearby plant and add to cashflow from the Cannon mine.

King River Copper has announced more high grade gold results from the Mt Remarkable gold project, 200km southwest of Kununurra in the Kimberley region of W.A. The company is targeting the Trudi Vein system with close spaced drilling to delineate multi-ounce, plunging ore shoots. Exploration drilling is underway east of the main Trudi lode too, at the intersection with the Grahame vein system.

Kopore Metals is starting a maiden 3,000m drilling program targeting the KM3 and GW3 targets at its Ghanzi West project in Botswana in search of regional scale copper silver anomalies. The project is located close to major development projects such as Cupric Canyon Capital’s Zone 5 resource and MOD Resources’ T3 copper project within the highly prospective but under-explored Kalahari copper belt.

Venus Metals has reported a significant increase in its near surface gold resource inventory at its Youanmi project to 10.1 million tonnes grading 1.65g/t gold for 533,000 ounces. When combined with the Youanmi Deeps underground resource, the global mineral resource at Youanmi now sits at just under 1.2 million ounces. The company is now looking at the viability of creating one “super pit” at the project.

Galena Mining has announced some outstanding results in a scoping study for its Abra lead project in WA. With an initial mine life of 11 years, a base case scenario produces a pre-tax, post-royalty net present value of $394 million and a 61 percent internal rate of return. When fully operational, Abra will produce 1 million tonnes annually and generate free cash flows of up to $110 million a year.

Reedy Lagoon will conduct sophisticated geophysical surveys at its lithium brine projects in southern Nevada to produce an accurate 3D picture of potentially lithium-rich groundwaters and boost its chances of a discovery. The survey technique, known as audio magneto tellurics, shows the location of highly conductive zones within the subsurface that could represent volcanic ash layers laden with lithium brines.

Hammer Metals is selling its 75% interest in the Millennium cobalt project in Queensland’s Mt Isa district to partner Global Energy Metals in exchange for a 19.9% stake in the Canadian company. This replaces the previous joint venture agreement and allows Hammer to focus on its exciting copper-gold exploration projects in Mt Isa.

King River Copper’s first trial with an alternative processing flow sheet for its giant Speewah deposit has produced vanadium pentoxide with a purity of 99.47% and could open the door to the production of a high purity vanadium product. The new process has become the focus of testing because it produces material that is more readily upgraded into electrolytes for vanadium redox batteries.

Southern Gold’s Gubong JV gold project in South Korea could have low capital and operating costs if results from preliminary metallurgical testwork carried out by partner Bluebird Merchant Ventures is any indication. A study into the economic feasibility of re-opening the historic high-grade mine is due to be completed in July 2018. With samples going an ounce to the tonne Gubong is looking interesting.

Legend Mining has extended the strike length of the third mineralised intrusive body at its Rockford project in Western Australia’s Fraser Range region to more than 100m. It will start regional aircore drilling on selected targets in the southern Rockford project and carry out a full geological and geochemical assessment of Area D drilling results.

Strike Energy expects its Jaws-1 deep coal seam gas well in South Australia’s Cooper Basin to potentially come online in early July. Production testing will confirm the commercial viability of Strike’s Southern Cooper Basin Gas Project which has conditional gas off-take agreements already in place with substantial domestic gas consumers.

Aquabotix has been awarded USD$78,000 from the US Navy to develop an unexploded ordnance detection solution that will be used to detect, locate and neutralise unexploded subsea ordnance. The company will incorporate the solution into its “SwarmDiver” miniature submarine drones or other unmanned underwater vehicles as it seriously strengthens its ties with one of the world’s most powerful militaries.