Public Company News

Oil explorer 88 Energy is making progress as it drills towards the 8000-foot reservoir targets at its potentially company making Merlin-2 well in Alaska. The company is chasing a possible 652 million barrel of oil resource as the it follows up on its 2021 Merlin-1 discovery. Merlin-2 spudded on the 7th of March and has been drilled to 2,005 feet. The surface casing has been installed and cemented in addition to the blow out preventer being tested.

Aldoro Resources could be closer to discovering lithium after intersecting pegmatites across multiple levels at its Niobe project, about 70 kilometres from Mount Magnet in Western Australia. According to the company, the recently completed drill program punched out 65-holes and struck pegmatites in almost all of them, confirming historical results and closing the campaign on a high.

Gold-focused Classic Minerals has cleared the final hurdle in its race to develop the Kat Gap gold mine after receiving regulatory approval for its mining operations. With its mining proposal and closure plan now given the green light Classic can progress to full-scale mining. The company is continuing the mining of a 49,000-tonne bulk sample that commenced last year.

Metal Hawk and JV partner, Western Areas have significantly ramped up exploration, with a maiden diamond drill campaign at their Kanowna East project near Kalgoorlie intersecting 220m of nickel bearing ultramafic rocks near the well-endowed Poseidon owned Silver Swan nickel mine. Western Areas has a 75 per cent earn in agreement by spending $7 million over five years across Metal Hawk’s Kanowna East, Emu Lake and Fraser South projects.

Brisbane based polymetallic explorer Superior Resources has expanded its tenement portfolio to a massive 1,158 square kilometres of prospective nickel-copper-PGE ground at its Greenvale project located around 210 kilometres west-northwest of Townsville in Queensland. The company believes the newly granted exploration leases hold the potential to host Voisey’s Bay or Julimar-Gonneville style magmatic sulphide systems.

King River Resources has identified a flurry of new economic and environmental improvements during its ongoing definitive feasibility study for its type 1 high purity alumina precursor processing plant. The type 1 aluminium salt precursor has shown a 5N level or 99.999 per cent purity and is considered an essential ingredient in the battery manufacturing industry.

ASX-listed ABx Group appears to have expanded its rare earths footprint in Tasmania after uncovering its fourth discovery in the region. The new prospect, called ‘Rubble Mound’ sits about six kilometres east of the company’s Deep Leads rare earths project and boasts grades of up to 1,620 parts per million total rare earth oxides. The company says early indications suggest an extensive queue of targets could sit between the two zones.

ASX-listed junior explorer Twenty Seven Co is gearing up for another round of auger drilling at its Yarbu gold project located approximately 160km northeast of Southern Cross in Western Australia. The campaign is designed to hit priority targets and infill anomalies detected in last year’s exploration. It plans to sink a further 330 holes with assays expected in late May.

Amidst a tight global market Technology Metals Australia has produced high vanadium recoveries up to 95 per cent in test work as it plans to merge its two deposits and deliver the world’s next large s

Kalgoorlie Gold Mining or KalGold has defined strong, continuous gold anomalism bordering the company’s La Mascotte gold prospect, part of its flagship Bulong Taurus gold project near Kalgoorlie in WA. The identified trend runs for over 2.3 kilometres and extends from the Turnpike prospect in the west through La Mascotte and continues eastward, supporting the company’s hypothesis of a large, connected gold system at Bulong Taurus.

The gold hits continue to roll in from Horizon Minerals’ Golden Ridge project near Kalgoorlie in the heart of Western Australia’s Goldfields. Results from the latest round of RC drilling have included 2 metres returning a tantalising 26.11 grams per tonne gold from 69m. The company appears to have also tapped into a nickel-rich ultramafic that lies only 8km north of the Blair nickel mine.

PolarX has expansion plans for its high-grade copper Caribou Dome deposit in Alaska. It sees potential for increasing both the average grade and tonnage of its existing resource already holding 2.8Mt of ore grading a respectable 3.1 per cent copper. The company says recently reported results have prompted a full review of the resource model and a new drilling campaign.