The countdown is on.
No, it's not US President Trump’s countdown to power plant strikes in Iran and no, it's unfortunately not the countdown to blastoff of SpaceX’s reported $100 billion IPO – a valuation likely to be in the trillions with a ‘T’.
The countdown is on until perhaps the most resource-rich country in the world runs out of fuel. Not a great thing for a vast country, reliant on long-haul transport, farming and mining.
Canberra seems to have spent years sleepwalking into this fuel security disaster.
Back in 2012, we dropped below the 90-day import reserve rule - a security standard born from the 1970’s oil shocks. Warnings then from union boss Paul Howes and others about shutting refineries were ignored as cheap Asian imports won out.
Result? We've now got just 34 days of petrol, 30 days of diesel and 27 days of jet fuel in reserve.
Despite the impending doom, the potential of an Iran deal lifted markets this week as the ASX bounced back 2.5 per cent and Trump bragged about his gift of 10 oil tankers from the Iranian government.
Australia and the EU finally inked an eight-year-in-the-making free trade agreement, slashing tariffs and opening the floodgates for our critical minerals to flow freely. It's a deliberate play to loosen the Chinese chokehold on supply chains, as humanoid robots, among other new tech, threaten to create a critical minerals storm driven by booming demand for rare earths and titanium.
Speaking of perfect storms, tropical cyclone Narelle has traversed almost half of Australia’s coastline, from Queensland to the Northwest Shelf, forcing shutdowns at major WA gas operations - just what the doctor ordered for an already gasping global gas market reeling from war-induced blackouts.
LNG buyers in Asia are feeling the pinch, with tightness likely to persist, especially if naughty cyclone Narelle takes away critical infrastructure.
Our Runners this week are a mixed bag, including a couple of rejoicing biotechs finally catching a bid after a year of brutal pain, a solid energy infrastructure play and a plucky Queensland copper-gold project.
Oh, and for the regulars of the column, a quick warning… Whitehaven Coal’s boss just sold some stock. Maybe it was legitimately for tax reasons, but we have rules here at Runners. If it's not the coal price moving the share price, then perhaps it’s all that pesky mine equipment that needs a bucket load of diesel to run its operations…
KILLI RESOURCES LTD (ASX: KLI)
Up 304% (5.2c – 21c)
Bulls N’ Bears Runner of the Week is a surprising junior goldie in Killi Resources, which has shaken off the $1500 drop in the gold price to quadruple its share price this week.
The company has unveiled a fresh corporate look and installed former Fortescue chief executive Nev Power as non-executive chair.
It is not a bad name to have in your corner, given Power helped turn Fortescue into a global iron ore heavyweight by tripling production and slashing costs during his tenure.
The board shake-up also brought in well-known resources dealmakers Steve Parsons and Michael Naylor as consultants, alongside a $1.424 million capital raise that will leave the pair as substantial shareholders.
The junior resource-savvy duo can do no wrong at the moment and have built a reputation for backing market-moving stories, most recently helping drive FireFly Metals to a roughly $1.5 billion valuation on the back of its Green Bay copper project in Canada.
Killi’s shares had already ripped 150 per cent higher on the news of new management before the company added another catalyst on Thursday, securing a Queensland government Collaborative Exploration Initiative (CEI) grant for drilling at its Mt Rawdon West project.
The grant will help fund drilling at the Baloo prospect, where recent exploration has outlined two standout targets, the Mt Rawdon Fault and King Louie Breccia prospects.
At Mt Rawdon Fault, the Killi has identified magnetic highs coinciding with strong geochemical anomalism, including copper and molybdenum, suggesting a potential porphyry monster lurking at depth.
Its King Louie breccia is also shaping as an intriguing target, with the geos outlining a 1100m by 225m gold, copper and molybdenum soil and rock-chip anomaly, hosted within a breccia system that appears to have seen multiple intrusive fluid events.
The CEI-backed program will initially consist of two diamond holes for 900 metres at Mt Rawdon Fault, although both targets now look firmly in the frame for follow-up drilling.
With a high-profile boardroom rebuild, fresh funding and a government-backed drill campaign on deck, Killi is beginning to shape as one of those classic early-stage exploration stories the punters rarely ignore for long.
AMPLIA THERAPEUTICS LTD (ASX: ATX)
Up 144% (11.25c – 27.5c)
A distant second but still more than doubling on the week is biotech trailblazer Amplia Therapeutics.
A little over a week after Immutep was barbecued to the tune of $500 million, following an oncology trial failure, Amplia is charging in the opposite direction due to its phase 1b/2a clinical trial for the incredibly nasty pancreatic cancer.
Last year, the company announced a pathological complete response – no detectable signs of cancer - in two patients enrolled in its “ACCENT” trial of a drug therapy originally designed to just limit tumour growth.
This time, Amplia reported that no fewer than 5 patients have now reported the same complete response from a total of just 64 people on the trial. An unprecedented complete response rate of 7.8 per cent.
The trial combined the therapy narmafotinib with two other drugs to treat a patient with metastatic (stage IV) pancreatic cancer. After surgery, the patient’s primary and metastatic tumours showed no live cancer cells, a unicorn-rare outcome in this brutal disease, where no detectable cancer signs are less common than a sunny day in Melbourne.
Pancreatic cancer is Australia’s eighth most common cancer and has a dismal 12.5 per cent five-year survival rate.
With US Food and Drug Administration registration already in the bag, Amplia’s drug looks to be on the charge to transform oncology, especially as healthcare systems globally grapple with rising cancer burdens and demand for precision therapies.
Now up to a whopping 5 complete responses in the trial, it appears onwards and upwards for this biotech in an otherwise labouring biotech sector.
NUENERGY GAS LTD (ASX: NGY)
Up 102% (4.7c – 9.5c)
Taking home bronze on the week is sleepy gas infrastructure giant NuEnergy Gas.
The company curiously started moving on no news and as usual, the fun police down at the ASX were quick to whack the stock into a trading halt, citing speeding allegations.
NuEnergy is a coal bed methane hopeful, focused on developing onshore natural gas for the domestic Indonesian market.
The company, which is not being priced as a mature producer, blamed an analyst article for its share price surge on Wednesday, insisting it had no further news to add to the market.
In a continually concerning gas market, NuEnergy’s run could be simply put down as an understandably leveraged punt on what could become an increasingly valuable domestic gas supply source, if its projects commercialise.
And the landscape is hardly getting any easier. While regulators have flagged some near-term breathing room, Australia’s gas market remains tight, with the ACCC still warning the southern states will need Queensland gas and storage support to bridge supply gaps, while longer-term shortfall risks remain firmly on the table.
That supply-security theme only sharpens when real-world disruptions hit the energy system. This week’s Tropical Cyclone Narelle has already forced shutdowns at major WA LNG infrastructure, again highlighting the vulnerability of supply chains.
Against that backdrop, NuEnergy’s recent progress at its flagship Tanjung Enim production sharing contract (PSC) – NuEnergy owns 45 per cent – positions the project as Indonesia’s first commercial-scale coalbed methane development.
That likely helps explain why the stock has climbed about 100 per cent over the past year and then surged a further 102 per cent on Wednesday.
For speculative punters, NuEnergy is not really a story about today’s revenue – it is a story about tomorrow’s scarcity.
4DMEDICAL LTD (ASX: 4DX)
Up 76% ($4.30c – $7.55)
The final Runner of the week is not merely a Bulls N’ Bears regular; its share price is measured in dollars rather than cents—a considerable achievement for the multi-billion dollar market-capper.
4DMedical surged on news that the world-famous Mayo Clinic had initiated deployment of its lung imaging technology, CT:VQ, for ventilation-perfusion analysis.
The first-of-its-kind, non-contrast imaging technology provides quantitative ventilation-perfusion analysis from a standard chest CT scan. In simple terms, it measures how effectively air and blood are moving through a patient’s lungs – a key factor in diagnosing conditions such as pulmonary embolism and chronic respiratory disease.
Unlike conventional nuclear medicine VQ scans, which rely on radioactive tracers to map airflow and blood flow, CT:VQ instead assesses regional lung tissue motion and changes in density to create highly detailed functional images, offering a less invasive diagnostic alternative.
The Mayo Clinic is widely regarded as the top-ranked hospital in the United States, making its adoption of CT:VQ another major commercial milestone for 4DMedical following the technology’s rollout across five leading US academic medical centres.
Under the agreement, Mayo will use CT:VQ to analyse lung ventilation and perfusion, giving its clinical teams the chance to become familiar with the platform’s advanced diagnostic outputs and evaluate its usefulness across a broad range of patient applications.
Mayo Clinic’s decision to adopt the technology marks one of the strongest institutional endorsements yet for 4DMedical’s respiratory imaging platform.
Given Mayo’s outsized influence on clinical practice, treatment pathways and the adoption of new technologies across both US and international healthcare systems, the deployment carries weight well beyond a single hospital network.
Alongside the company’s distribution partnership with Philips and its expanding commercial pipeline, the Mayo agreement further bolsters 4DMedical’s push to position CT:VQ as a next-generation standard in ventilation-perfusion imaging.
The lack of any need for new scanning hardware – and the software’s compatibility with existing CT infrastructure – also makes the platform a potentially cheaper and lower-risk alternative to traditional imaging methods.
Our Runner’s regular hit a share price of $7.55 on Friday, briefly up around 3183 per cent from this time 8 months ago.
As we called it then, 4DMedical has swiftly disrupted the respiratory diagnostics market and looks set to join the index as Australia’s next blue-chip biotech story.
Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@businessnews.com.au
By Andrew Todd
