Impact Minerals has been awarded a $75,000 grant from the New South Wales Government in a nod to the company's technical accomplishments at its Broken Hill project. The windfall was awarded by the New Frontiers Cooperative Drilling grants programme and Impact will use the money to test its exploration play for nickel-copper-platinum group metal deposits.
Impact is planning on drilling along a six kilometre long prospective zone known as the Rockwell-Little Broken Hill Gabbro trend. The trend has been subject to patchy and poor historical exploration, according to the company.
The Perth based explorer said it recently picked up a few rock samples across the Little Broken Hill trend where key prospects such as Red Hill and Platinum Springs have already turned up some stellar results and confirmed the presence of impressive grades.
At Red Hill, Impact’s recent rock chip samples showed results ranging between 1g/t PGM and 36g/t PGM and from 0.2% copper to 6.1% copper.
Previous drilling at Red Hill returned some standout results including 1.2 metres grading 254 grams per tonne palladium, 10.4g/t platinum, 10.9g/t gold, 7.4% nickel, 1.8% copper, 19g/t silver, 0.5% cobalt, 4.6g/t rhodium, 7.2g/t iridium, 5.6g/t osmium and 3.1g/t ruthenium.
Another cracking intercept at Red Hill that was essentially a cocktail of multiple minerals went 3.5m grading 5g/t platinum, 6g/t gold, 144g/t palladium, 2.9% nickel, 2.3% copper and 14.5 g/t silver.
The company said that a total of 12 of the 13 holes drilled at its recent program at Red Hill returned significant numbers, all within 70m of the surface.
Impact’s 2016 drilling at Platinum Springs hit massive sulphides with 0.6m grading 11.5g/t platinum, 25.6g/t palladium, 1.4g/t gold, 7.6% copper, 7.4% nickel, 44.3g/t silver, 1.3g/t rhodium, 1.7g/t iridium, 2.0g/t osmium and 0.8g/t ruthenium.
Platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium, osmium and ruthenium all have a variety of commercial uses and tend to be highly stable and often used as catalysts in medicines and electronics.
More recently, Impact Minerals formed a strategic “Broken Hill Alliance” with fellow ASX-listed companies, Castillo Copper and private group, Squadron Resources, to amalgamate what the companies hope will be the largest landholding surrounding the world-class Broken Hill zinc-lead-silver mine.
Importantly, Impact retains the rights to explore for all its lucrative PGMs, nickel, copper and other precious metals across its tenements.
Impact Managing Director Dr Mike Jones said: “We are very pleased to have received this $75,000 grant for drilling at Broken Hill. It is a testament to the in-house research we have completed there over the past few years on the potential of the region to host high grade nickel copper-PGM mineralisation. The recent discoveries of similar mineralisation in magmatic massive sulphides by both Chalice Gold Mines Limited at Julimar near Perth and Legend Mining Limited near Nova-Bollinger in the Fraser Range show that there is considerable interest in this style of mineralisation.”
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