Public Company News

Horizon Minerals has achieved a significant milestone at its Boorara gold mine, 10km east of Kalgoorlie-Boulder, producing its inaugural gold bar less than six months after its stage one feasibility study and some two months after breaking first ground at the Regal East pit.

Lithium Australia’s 50 per cent-owned lithium battery subsidiary, Soluna Australia, has installed its first residential modular lithium battery storage units in Perth. The lithium battery systems, which can be connected to roof mounted solar panels, store energy for later consumption – particularly at times when the sun is not shining. Soluna said the installations took place in the northern and southern suburbs over the past week.

ASX-listed aspiring gold developer, Middle Island Resources, is steadily building towards a mineable resource inventory at its historic Sandstone project in the central Goldfields in WA after recently reporting an increase in the total mineral resource that pushed it above 650,000 ounces of gold. The new resource now stands at 17.97 million tonnes going 1.13 grams per tonne for a contained 650,600 ounces of gold.

St George Mining is exploring for nickel-copper depth extensions at its Mt Alexander project in Western Australia, with a diamond hole currently around 795m below the surface. The hole is planned to target an exciting conductive feature below the Investigators prospect. Encouraging geology points to the potential for another nickel belt, parallel to the prolific Cathedrals Belt, according to St George.

Barton Gold’s due diligence on about 15 years’ worth of geological data may start to pay off shortly with a razor focused drill rig set and ready to test the more exciting geological targets at its Tarcoola gold project in South Australia. The company’s maiden exploration program will comprise up to 6,000 metres of RC drilling and will test for “mine-ready” extensions.

Kingwest Resources has lifted the total mineral resource at its historic Menzies gold project about 130km north of Kalgoorlie by a further 37 per cent after updating the estimate for the Lady Shenton deposit and unveiling a maiden estimate for the Stirling deposit. The revised global inferred and indicated resource for Menzies now stands at 4.78 million tonnes going 2.08 g/t for 319,900 ounces of contained gold, with much of it near surface.

Hot Chili is now a copper and gold producer and whilst it has spent a lot of time, money and effort proving up its Chilean projects, it spent nothing on CAPEX to start mining. Spurred on by fabulous copper and gold prices, Hot Chili has hit a big milestone with the start of mining at Productora four months ahead of schedule.

ASX-listed base metals hopeful, Blackstone Minerals, continues to put runs on the board in northern Vietnam as its company-owned drill rigs continue their run of success at the Ban Chang deposit within the Ta Khoa nickel-copper-PGM project with more lucrative looking sulphide nickel mineralisation presenting in the samples. Blackstone is chasing massive sulphide veins similar to its nearby Ban Phuc deposit, where previous owners produced 20,700t of nickel, 10,100t of copper and 67,000t of cobalt between 2013 and 2016.

Impact Minerals now has around $5.5m in its war chest after raising $3.24m in a heavily oversubscribed placement to follow up on past drilling that unearthed possibly the best platinum group result ever produced in Australia near Broken Hill in NSW. The project boasts a smorgasbord of mixed metals headlined by platinum, palladium, gold, nickel and copper.

Podium Minerals has kicked off on a resource drilling program at its Parks Reef platinum group metals deposit near Cue. The company aims to link up and fill in the gaps in the Parks Reef resource where there is little to no existing drilling and extend the total modelled resources over a combined length of 8.5 kilometres.

Godolphin Resources is gearing up for the second phase of drilling at its Mount Aubrey project in the revered copper-gold Lachlan Fold Belt in NSW, as it looks to join the plethora of gold hopefuls clamouring to transform historic mothballed mining projects into lucrative money makers once again. Earlier this year, Godolphin ploughed in 14 RC drill holes at Mt Aubrey, most of which intersected gold mineralisation.

ASX-listed Perth based Delecta Ltd has boots on the ground now at its REX uranium-vanadium project in the US where its field team has picked up some interesting rock chips grading up to 0.53 per cent U3O8. The samples also returned up to 1.36 per cent vanadium pentoxide, underscoring the historical uranium-vanadium occurrences in the region.