Public Company News

Neometals has revealed plans for its 50 per cent-owned subsidiary Primobius to deliver a fully-integrated hydrometallurgical refinery hub to Stelco, offering recycled battery metal products to the electric vehicle market. Primobius’ option to acquire up to a 50 per cent equity in the Stelco special purpose vehicle has been extended until June 30 in 2025 to align with the fully-integrated plant offer.

Ora Banda Mining has received an early $10 million Christmas present as part of its Goldfields project farm-in agreement with Wesfarmers subsidiary Davyston Exploration – and another $16 million is on the way. Davyston will get 65 per cent of the lithium rights at the Davyhurst gold project north of Kalgoorlie, which has a drill hit of 11.1m at 1.28 per cent lithium oxide from 54m.

Reach Resources has added 16 new targets to its niobium-rare earths project in the highly-prospective Gascoyne battery metals province of Western Australia, about 260km east of Carnarvon, following soil assays. The company says a tenement-wide soils program at its Wabli Creek project threw up promising assays going 3860 parts per million total rare earth oxides (TREO), 2744ppm, 2425ppm, 2271ppm, 1976ppm and 1918ppm.

Estrella Resources will use a $1.327 million research-and-development tax rebate from the ATO to repay a loan facility, with about $181,000 in surplus cash to be aimed at further exploring its Carr Boyd nickel project in Western Australia’s Goldfields region. The company says it will continue its R&D work into mineralisation genesis and make a further claim at the end of the next financial year.

Novo Resources is closing out its year with a flurry, revealing it has formed a new joint venture partnership with private company Liatam Mining for its Quartz Hill project in Western Australia’s East Pilbara region. Subject to TSX approval, Liatam has also agreed to invest $1.8 million for 9 million Novo shares at 20c each to increase its shareholding to about 6 per cent.

GreenTech Metals has wrapped up what it says has been a “transformative” year for the company after finishing a maiden diamond drilling program for both its Osborne JV and Ruth Well projects in the West Pilbara region of WA. The program involved four holes for a total of 1611m and was designed to assess stratigraphic and structural aspects of the lithium-rich pegmatites in both areas.

Galan Lithium is on track to install the first pond of its Hombre Muerto West lithium brine project in Argentina before the end of the year, with 85 per cent of the construction process now complete. The initial filling of the pond is expected by the first quarter of next year and the project remains on track for maiden production in the first half of 2025.

Aurum Resources has completed its acquisition of PlusOr Global and now officially owns ground in Africa’s Côte d’Ivoire, where historic drill hits have run as high as 1m at a massive 30.8g/t gold from 42m. The company says diamond drilling at the project is underway and 29 holes have been completed across three targets for 4592m of core, with assays due back next month.

Altech Batteries has forecast a stunning project life EBITDA of more than €3.08 billion (AU$5 billion) for its 8000 tonnes per annum Silumina Anodes project in Germany following the completion of a definitive feasibility study. The facility will produce patented alumina-coated silicon battery anode materials known as Silumina Anodes to meet high demand in the European and US electric vehicle and grid storage battery markets.

Legend Mining says seismic reprocessing and machine learning have boosted the exploration potential of its Rockford project within Western Australia’s rugged Fraser Range, about 250km east of Kalgoorlie. The new geophysical datasets suggest a depth extension of the Mawson nickel-copper-cobalt deposit that already has an indicated resource of 860,000 tonnes at 1.34 per cent nickel, 0.88 per cent copper and 0.08 per cent cobalt.

Strickland Metals is finishing off a prosperous 2023 in style, today revealing new assay results from air-core drilling at its Horse Well prospect in Western Australia’s Mid West region, that include a highlight hit of 36m at 1.2g/t gold from 24m, with 16m going 2.5g/t gold from 32m. The company says the intercept highlights new mineralisation potential between its Filly SW and Warmblood resources.

The addition of fluorine to the Australian Government’s list of critical minerals has put ABx Group in prime position to impact global supply after it successfully pilot tested its new fluorine reactor process. The batch-scale testing that involved the processing of waste bath was recently carried out by the company’s 83 per cent-owned subsidiary, Alcore.