Public Company News

Galena Mining has commenced deep exploration drilling at its Woodlands copper prospect, 200km north of Meekatharra. The company is targeting two high priority electromagnetic targets delineated last year from heliborne geophysical surveys. The targets coincide with historical drill intersections that include 60m @ 0.3% copper from 505m and 3m @ 1.6% copper from 188m down-hole.

Security surveillance company Spectur will roll out state-of-the-art artificial intelligence technology on its suite of security camera systems, enabling its remotely monitored solar-powered cameras to learn and recognize peoples’ faces, vehicle number plates and even specific objects. Perth-based Spectur expects field trials of the new smart camera technology to commence in the next two months.

Emu NL says it might be on the cusp of an exciting gold-silver discovery at the Vidalita project, within the strongly mineralised Maricunga belt in Chile. The company has completed a drill campaign that identified wide intervals of rock types, textures and alterations that could represent the top of a high value, epithermal gold system. Visible sulphides were intersected beneath anomalous surface sampling.

With the wet season out of the way, King River has finally begun follow up drilling at Mt Remarkable in the East Kimberley, where drilling in November produced one of the year’s most exciting gold hits. One rig is already on site, and another is on its way to the high-grade epithermal gold discovery that produced 11m at 27.9 g/t gold, including 1m at 90.7 g/t.

Terrain Minerals is about to kick off its maiden drill program at the Red Mulga project, 100km east of Kalbari. The company believes that a large mafic-ultramafic geological complex may exist at the project, based on anomalous nickel, copper and chromium assays returned from surface sampling. Drilling will also target elevated gold, copper, silver and lead assays returned from extensive quartz veining.

Legend Mining has announced anomalous nickel-copper assays from an aircore drill program at its Rockford project in the Fraser Range of W.A. The work returned results up to 37m @ 0.34% nickel and 0.22% copper from 56m depth, extending the mineralisation at the Area D prospect to over 300 metres. The company also reported that end-of-hole drill chips contained nickel-copper sulphide minerals.

Blackham Resources suddenly has more gold reserves available for processing through its existing Carbon in Leach plant at the Matilda-Wiluna project thanks to positive results from recent metallurgical testwork. The testing found that transitional ore between oxides at the surface and the bedrock sulphides is suited to CIL treatment, and can be processed at a 30% lower cost than previously thought.

After a period of relatively low activity, ASX listed junior, Spectrum Rare Earths looks like it has stumbled across a potential company maker in Northern California. The Perth based company has locked down an option to purchase a mothballed, fully permitted gold mine that has historically produced around 250,000 ounces of gold at an amazing average grade of around an ounce to the tonne.

Northern Minerals’ heavy rare earths project at Browns Range in the East Kimberley appears to be timed to perfection following last week’s shock announcement of production cut backs by China. With construction of Browns Range on track to be completed next month, there could hardly be a better time for Northern to emerge as the only dysprosium source outside of China.

Strike Energy’s share price has been on a white knuckle ride over the last few weeks as investors desperately try to work out if it is going to be the next large cap gas producer in Australia, or fail whilst daring to create a new technical frontier in the search for coal seam gas riches. Strike significantly de-risked its Jaws-1 well this week with the installation of a liner and its fracture stimulation sleeves.

In what appears to be a serious opportunity for W.A, the smart money in the lithium space is now moving downstream into the production of lithium-ion battery chemicals such as lithium carbonate and lithium hydroxide and the mining of lithium is now looking a bit like the poor cousin. Neometals has kicked off its engineering and design study for a proposed Kalgoorlie lithium hydroxide plant.

In what looks to be an astute move, Calima Energy is set to race from 20% to outright ownership of its coveted Montney shale liquid/gas project in Canada through friendly, all-scrip takeover bids for its joint venture partners. The Perth-based junior has secured board recommendations and pre-bid acceptances from several major shareholders in a deal that will bulk up its profile in the revered oil and gas basin