Public Company News

Octava Minerals has the drill bit primed for a maiden nickel-copper-cobalt exploration program at its Yallalong project in Western Australia’s Mid West region, as part of a strategic collaboration with the CSIRO – the nation’s premier science agency. The campaign will test several significant anomalies identified through the CSIRO’s Kick-Start program, an initiative designed to assist innovative Australian start-ups and small-to-medium enterprises.

Strickland Metals’ aggressive gold hunt in Western Australia is steaming ahead at full pace, with its recent air-core drilling program highlighting consistent hits in a newly-defined 750m zone at its Yandal project near Wiluna. The company says bottom-of-hole intercepts indicate a new structure west of its highly-promising Dusk til Dawn prospect that contains an inferred resource of 109,000 gold ounces.

Lindian Resources has revealed high-grade rare earths running up to 7.15 per cent TREO at its enormous Kangankunde project in the African country of Malawi following a geological mapping and sampling campaign. The company says its most recent work shows that outcropping carbonatite prospects both north and south of the project are highly mineralised with rare earths.

This week’s Bulls N’ Bears profiled ASX runner is … Prodigy Gold. Its share price rose 125 per cent to join fellow movers and shakers American Rare Earths, Dateline Resources and Way2Vat.

Valor Resources has secured an 80 per cent share of the highly-prospective Hook Lake uranium project in Canada, just two days after acquiring the 83sq-km Frazer Lake lithium play across the country in Ontario. Hook Lake is in the Athabasca Basin in northern Saskatchewan – a region that has become widely known as being the world’s leading producer of high-grade uranium.

Gold Mountain has kicked off a new thrust into rare earths exploration at its Down Under project after amassing a giant land position of some 970 square kilometres in the prospective Jequie province in Brazil. The company has pegged its ground largely based on areas of anomalous thorium and uranium geochemistry, which is known to be associated with rare earths mineralisation in the province.

Alma Metals has extended the higher-grade copper-molybdenum mineralisation strike at the Central Zone within its Briggs project in Queensland to about 500m, with new drill hits including 161m at 0.29 per cent copper and 71ppm moly from 22m. The intercept is part of a longer 242.4m zone beginning just 5.4m from surface and running 0.26 per cent copper and 60ppm moly.

Ora Banda Mining is on track to achieve steady-state production at its Riverina underground gold mine near Kalgoorlie in the June quarter, with capital projects complete and first stopes to be mined next month. First ore from the underground operation was processed as a single batch through the company’s nearby Davyhurst processing plant and returned 16,727 tonnes at 2.74g/t to produce 1383 gold ounces.

St George Mining has defined a series of 1km-long lithium soil anomalies in areas yet to be drill-tested at its flagship Mt Alexander project in WA’s Goldfields region after a successful sampling program. The company is gearing up to drill the new targets as early as next month, with its biggest prospect covering a strike of more than 2.7km.

Lithium Universe has initiated key metallurgical testwork on different spodumene types from all around the globe, with a view to creating a robust stream of feedstock for its proposed lithium refinery project in Quebec. The battery-grade lithium carbonate refinery has been designed to mirror the Jiangsu Lithium Carbonate Plant and will be able to process spodumene from any part of the world.

Valor Resources has secured the rights to acquire the 83-square-kilometre Frazer Lake lithium project in Canada’s Ontario province where pegmatite sampling has yielded 44m at 0.54 per cent lithium oxide. The company today revealed it had signed a definitive purchase option agreement to pick up Frazer Lake, which lies in the Thunder Bay region that has several significant lithium projects under development.

Octava Minerals and Future Metals are set to gallop onto their Palomino prospect in a bid to define the mineralised footprint at their East Kimberley JV sitting along strike from WA’s historic Copernicus mine. The JV plans to kick off the new field season with structural and geological mapping and soil sampling in the highly-prospective nickel sulphide and PGM setting of the Halls Creek Orogen.