Public Company News

Sri Lankan government legislation designed to promote its mineral sands industry and exports has delivered a major boost for Titanium Sands and its bold development plans for its project on Mannar Island in the country’s north-east. The recent legislation was brought in to ensure local participation in adding value to related products earmarked for export.

Classic Minerals will begin trial mining at its Kat Gap project in Western Australia’s goldfields as it looks to calculate an ore reserve prior to moving into full-scale gold mining and production. The company says the pit will take about two months to complete, cost about $1.5 million and will target fully-oxidized high-grade ore, representing about half the indicated resource, to about 45m.

Newly-appointed Lithium Australia managing director Simon Linge has vowed to fast-track the company’s development as the Perth-based battery innovator moves to commercialise its patented technologies. Mr Linge has more than 25 years of global manufacturing, recycling and engineering services experience and as the company’s chief executive officer, contributed to the landmark development agreement signed earlier this month with mining heavyweight Mineral Resources.

Phase-one construction of Galan Lithium’s first 205,000-square-metre solar evaporation pond has kicked-off at the company’s Hombre Muerto West project in Argentina’s renowned “Lithium Triangle”. Management expects the pond to be complete and filled with brine by next year’s first quarter and then to be producing a 6 per cent lithium chloride concentrate by the first half of 2025.

Strickland Metals has begun an induced-polarisation (IP) survey at its Great Western project, about 85km north-east of Wiluna in Western Australia, to explore a promising, but untested coincident magnetic, geochemical and gravity anomaly. The company says the structural setting at the site, which is largely masked by transported cover, is considered favourable for large, high-grade orogenic gold deposits.

Perth-based explorer Si6 Metals has promoted its executive director Jim Malone to managing director as the company matures rare earths and lithium projects in Brazil, in addition to other operations in Botswana and Australia. It comes after it moved to acquire about 178 square kilometres of tier-one Brazilian rare earths and lithium ground in the Jequitinhonha Valley – which is fast becoming known as “Lithium Valley”.

Buru Energy says a surprise State Government policy update has fortified its development strategy for its 100 per cent-owned Rafael gas field in WA’s onshore Canning Basin, confirming its right to export gas. The updated “Domestic Gas Policy” confirms that fields such as Rafael, which are not connected to existing pipelines, must reserve only 15 per cent of their export volumes for the domestic market.

American West Metals has continued a winning streak at its Storm project in Canada, striking an 18m intercept of visual copper sulphides in its latest diamond drillhole. The hit extends copper mineralisation 2km from its recent Thunder zone discovery hole that yielded more than 76m of visible copper sulphide mineralisation, hinting that the company has tapped into a major belt-scale sediment-hosted copper system.

Terrain Minerals has identified multiple zones of gallium mineralisation at its Smokebush project in Western Australia’s Mid West region, less than a month after the metal sent another explorer’s share price rocketing. Drill results at the company’s Rabbit Warren and Paradise City prospects were of comparable grade to the Arizona assays that saw Gold 50’s stock jump 146 per cent.

Reimagined explorer Lithium Universe Limited will use artificial intelligence to assimilate imagery and data to assist development and optimisation of its exploration strategy at its Apollo lithium project in Canada. The company will use its AI information in concert with other geological data as part of an initial goal to fast-track exploration in its high-latitude project environment, where field-time has traditionally been restricted by the seasons.

ABx Group has started a new 18-hole campaign to see if it can expand on a recent 11m-thick hit at 1700ppm total rare earth oxides at its promising Deep Leads prospect in Northern Tasmania. It says the RC program will target the northern section of its exploration area near the recent rare earths hit in a bid to find similar thickness and enrichments.

Venture Minerals has engaged Curtin University to start stage-two metallurgical testwork on its tin-rich Mount Lindsay borates. The testing follows the CSIRO’s stage-one investigation into the extraction of tin, boron and iron from tin-iron borates, conducted in a bid to enhance tin recovery and produce a high-value boron byproduct to add another revenue stream to the project.