Public Company News

Lithium Australia is seeking to become a leading lithium-ion battery supplier through an alliance with DLG Battery – one of China’s ten largest battery manufacturers. The two companies will form a joint venture to manufacture lithium-ion packs and modules in Australia, produce batteries using their technologies for both local and global markets and offer battery-recycling solutions.

TNG Ltd has been granted Vietnamese patents for its proprietary TIVAN technology for the extraction and recovery of high-purity vanadium, complementing its existing patents in Australia, Russia, Canada and the US. The patents provide further protection for the hydrometallurgical process as it progresses its Mount Peake vanadium-titanium-iron project in the Northern Territory.

Black Rock has executed two further Chinese offtake agreements at mutually agreed grades, volumes and prices for the premium graphite flake concentrate products sourced and processed from its impressive Mahenge project in Tanzania. With the pricing framework now in place for four of its five offtake partners, the company is now focussed on delivering an optimised Definitive Feasibility Study for the project.

Hammer Metals’ rock chip sampling at the Malbon region near Mount Isa in northwest Queensland has returned intriguing grades of up to 12.9 grams per tonne gold and 15.8% copper and identified the new Speculation, Pioneer Prince and Alice-Kings trends. The company said that outcrop in the area is sparse and further mapping and sampling would be required to understand the extent and structural controls of mineralisation.

Strike Energy is on track to spud its highly anticipated West Erregulla-2 well in the Perth Basin, which will target up to 1.16 trillion cubic feet of gas and 7.2 million barrels of oil, later this month. The company recently uncovered further evidence that West Erregulla is similar to Japanese company Mitsui’s nearby Waitsia gas field - one of Australia’s largest onshore gas fields.

Blackstone Minerals is set to acquire a 90% interest in the advanced Ta Khoa nickel project in northern Vietnam from AMR Nickel Limited over a 12-month period costing AUD$1.6m in cash and scrip. The project includes an existing 450,000 tonne per annum concentrator and is located in a prospective, underexplored district that contains numerous massive and disseminated sulphide occurrences with nickel, copper, cobalt and PGEs.

Altech Chemicals has reached another milestone on its journey towards becoming a significant high purity alumina, producer with the raising of the first steel column at its plant site in Johor, Malaysia. The plant in the Tanjung Industrial complex will produce up to 4,500 tonnes of HPA from very pure kaolin clays sourced from the company’s shallow open pit mine near Meckering in WA.

Massive UK investment fund, M & G Investments, who has a whopping £286b under management, has stumped up $6.3m to cornerstone Perth small cap, Troy Resources’ latest capital raise. Troy will use the money to develop a resource at its exciting, high grade, near mine exploration play in South America known as Ohio Creek, that looks set to turbocharge the economics of its operating Karouni gold mine.

MGC Pharmaceuticals has made the first shipment of its medical cannabis-derived formulation for the relief of seizures associated with severe epilepsy into the UK. The company’s UK distribution partners Grow Biotech and IPS have already received initial prescriptions for the drug. This early interest is encouraging if the company’s prediction that the UK medical cannabis market will grow to €8.8bn by 2028.

Adriatic Metals has intersected very encouraging, thick intersections of base and precious metals mineralisation from drilling in its new Concession area at the northern end of the exciting Rupice prospect in Bosnia. The new results include 30m @ 9.7% zinc, 5.2% lead, 265g/t silver, 4.6g/t gold, 0.4% copper and 43% barite from 246m down-hole that will be incorporated into a mineral resource estimate for Rupice later this year.

Artemis Resources has estimated an indicated resource of 152,000t @ 0.63% nickel and 0.47% copper for contained resources of 965t of nickel and 713t of copper at its Ruth Well project in WA’s West Pilbara region. In line with its new gold focus, the company will undertake a heritage survey over the Monarch and Conqueror targets in the current quarter. Both targets are within trucking distance of its Radio Hill processing plant.

PharmAust can now assess dosing strategies for the upcoming Phase II clinical trials for its anti-cancer drug Monepantel in dogs after receiving further positive results from the ongoing Phase I trial. Serum levels of both Monepantel and its major metabolite, monepantel sulfone, exceeded the predicted anti-cancer activity target values in dogs administered just one tablet per day.