Public Company News

Sovereign Metals has outlined encouraging preliminary metallurgical test work results for its Wofiira rutile prospect in Malawi, East Africa, generating a potentially premium high-quality product, with low impurities, from conventional mineral sands processing. The concentrated ore product contained 96% titanium dioxide at a recovered grade of 1.1% rutile and is on par with many of the world’s leading rutile producers.

AVZ Minerals will control 65% of the Manono lithium-tin project in the south-eastern region of the DRC after paying USD$5.5m to private company Dathomir Mining Resources SARL for an additional 5% stake in the tier-1 deposit. The monies are payable to Dathomir within three years and the agreement will generate an additional NPV of USD$130m for the company based on recent scoping study results.

Neometals’ synthetic zeolite product generated from lithium hydroxide production waste, has held its own against similar industry-leading products from a reference Japanese manufacturer. The company will now proceed with a pilot plant test of its proprietary process in the September quarter of 2019, which will in turn feed into a class 3 engineering study and feasibility study.

Venus Metals has this week pocketed $2.55m and a swag of shares in fellow ASX-listed company Rox Resources after the companies established a 50/50 joint venture agreement for the prospective Youanmi gold mine leases in WA. Several other JV agreements have now also commenced, which focus more on near-mine and regional exploration activities in the underexplored Youanmi greenstone belt.

ASX-listed MGC Pharmaceuticals continues to spread its wings, signing an agreement with Germany’s Mexacare for the distribution of the company’s medical cannabis products to Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Germany’s medical cannabis market alone was worth €133 million in 2018 and is estimated to grow to €7.7 billion by 2028, making it a key emerging market for MGC.

Strike Energy continues to gradually increase gas flow at its Jaws-1 super-deep coal seam gas well in the Cooper Basin, South Australia, as more coal transitions from water to gas production. Pumps have been set to maintain a pressure of 250psi to allow the desorption front to gradually spread outwards into the rest of the reservoir as more coal transitions from water to gas production.

Lithium Australia has identified lithium and tantalum mineralised pegmatite dykes over a 5km strike in shallow historical tourmaline and tin mine workings at the Dudley prospect of its Kangaroo Island project in South Australia. Rock chip sampling returned assays of up to 0.43% lithium oxide, 770 ppm tantalum, 460 ppm niobium and 1600 ppm rubidium despite the strong weathering of outcrops.

Calidus Resources has generated encouraging infill drilling results that confirm the grade continuity of its Klondyke ore system at the Warrawoona gold project in the Pilbara region of WA ahead of next month’s PFS. The company has also completed a surface trench sampling program over the Klondyke resource to establish the grade and thickness of gold mineralisation and support future mining operations.

Neometals Ltd has signed a binding memorandum of understanding with India’s third-largest power trading and diversified renewable energy company, Manikaran Power, to develop the first lithium refinery in the country. The joint initiative comes as India moves to build up a domestic lithium-ion battery manufacturing capacity and promote the use of more electric vehicles.

Hot Chili has delineated a thick, high-grade zone of copper-gold mineralisation at its Cuerpo 3 porphyry copper deposit in central Chile, that returned 188m @ 0.9% copper and 0.4g/t gold from 516m down-hole within a wider 622m intercept. The company said the intercept was comparable to results from SolGold’s Cascabel porphyry copper-gold discovery in Ecuador, which holds 5.2 million tonnes of copper and 12.3 million ounces of gold.

Strike Energy is continuing to drill its West Erregulla-2 well in the Perth Basin, WA, towards the secondary and primary gas targets after intersecting some hydrocarbon shows in the tertiary oil target. While the shows in the Cattamarra oil target were deemed insufficient to warrant the running of wireline logging, the company said that the results supported its geological model and would help with future activities.

ASX-listed medical cannabis player, MGC Pharmaceuticals has extended its reach to Brazil after signing a three-year exclusive distribution agreement with ONIX Empreendimentos e Participações. Brazil is a key emerging market with specialist market insight provider, Prohibition Partners, estimating that the Brazilian and Latin American medical cannabis sector could be worth up to USD$8.5 billion by 2028.