Public Company News

Hammer Metals is selling its 75% interest in the Millennium cobalt project in Queensland’s Mt Isa district to partner Global Energy Metals in exchange for a 19.9% stake in the Canadian company. This replaces the previous joint venture agreement and allows Hammer to focus on its exciting copper-gold exploration projects in Mt Isa.

King River Copper’s first trial with an alternative processing flow sheet for its giant Speewah deposit has produced vanadium pentoxide with a purity of 99.47% and could open the door to the production of a high purity vanadium product. The new process has become the focus of testing because it produces material that is more readily upgraded into electrolytes for vanadium redox batteries.

Southern Gold’s Gubong JV gold project in South Korea could have low capital and operating costs if results from preliminary metallurgical testwork carried out by partner Bluebird Merchant Ventures is any indication. A study into the economic feasibility of re-opening the historic high-grade mine is due to be completed in July 2018. With samples going an ounce to the tonne Gubong is looking interesting.

Legend Mining has extended the strike length of the third mineralised intrusive body at its Rockford project in Western Australia’s Fraser Range region to more than 100m. It will start regional aircore drilling on selected targets in the southern Rockford project and carry out a full geological and geochemical assessment of Area D drilling results.

Strike Energy expects its Jaws-1 deep coal seam gas well in South Australia’s Cooper Basin to potentially come online in early July. Production testing will confirm the commercial viability of Strike’s Southern Cooper Basin Gas Project which has conditional gas off-take agreements already in place with substantial domestic gas consumers.

Aquabotix has been awarded USD$78,000 from the US Navy to develop an unexploded ordnance detection solution that will be used to detect, locate and neutralise unexploded subsea ordnance. The company will incorporate the solution into its “SwarmDiver” miniature submarine drones or other unmanned underwater vehicles as it seriously strengthens its ties with one of the world’s most powerful militaries.

Neometals Ltd has reported a major increase to its nickel mineral resources at the Mt Edwards project courtesy of four new deposits, nearly tripling metal inventories to 7.4 million tonnes grading 1.7% nickel for just over 123,000 tonnes. The company recently completed the acquisition of the Mt Edwards tenements from Apollo Phoenix Resources and with them, the assignment of further nickel rights.

Vonex has started beta development of its Oper8tor communication aggregator application with a focus on system designs and platform architecture. Controlled testing is expected to start in October 2018 and the company is planning to soft-launch the app in Western Europe next year, to take advantage of its significant population and mobile phone usage.

Artemis Resources and Novo Resources have commenced a major exploration program aimed at proving up grades and tonnages at the Purdy’s Reward conglomerate and paleoplacer gold deposit, 35km southeast of Karratha, in the west Pilbara of W.A. The work will generate a mineralisation report to underwrite the application for a mining lease and the company also reported its 3.3km super-deep drill hole has reached 163m depth.

St George Mining has increased the footprint of high grade nickel-copper sulphide mineralisation at the Stricklands prospect with intersections that include 6.25m @ 2.36% nickel, 1% copper, 0.15% cobalt and 1.25g/t total PGEs from 67.2m down-hole. Mineralisation is open to the west, north and east of the prospect and the company is planning a follow-up drill program.

King River Copper is thinking about a serious upsizing of its proposed mine at Speewah after an initial pit study found a monster-sized pit could be the best approach to mining the giant vanadium-titanium-iron deposit. The latest study has lowered the strip ratio to just 0.4 to 1, taking full advantage of the large, flat-lying and evenly-distributed mineralisation.

Adriatic Metals has announced more stunning drill results from its Rupice prospect in Bosnia. High grade results were retuned from two ore lenses intersected in the same drill hole, including 36 metres grading 4.4g/t gold, 463g/t silver, 0.5% copper, 4.3% lead, 5.7% zinc and 55% barite from 196m down-hole and 22m @ 4.1g/t gold, 258g/t silver, 0.8% copper, 7.5% lead, 12.8% zinc and 56% barite from 244m down-hole.