Venture shares spike after WA rare earths hit

Shares in Venture Minerals vaulted over 30 per cent on intraday trading after the company doubled its rare earths portfolio through a new discovery at its Golden Grove North zinc-copper-gold project in WA’s Mid-West.

Results from a surface sampling campaign at the operation’s Vulcan prospect graded up to 12.5 per cent total rare earth oxides, or “TREO”.

Shares in Venture rose to a high of 0.033c during intraday trading, up from yesterday’s close of 0.022c.

Notably, the new results from Vulcan include several samples with grades over 1 per cent TREO with inclusions of in-demand elements praseodymium and neodymium oxide running up to 5,460 and 14,575 parts per million respectively.

The company believes its new rare earth target is backed by legacy soil samples which were originally assessed for volcanic massive sulfide, or “VMS” style mineralisation but also tested for lanthanum and cerium – a pair of rare earth elements.

Venture says it has followed up on the historical work and also recently completed a soil sampling campaign at Vulcan in which specimens both confirmed and further defined the the legacy results.

Management has subsequently prioritised the target for further work as it aims to get a handle on the nature and scale of the rare earths opportunity.

The company previously plunged a diamond hole to chase up VMS-style mineralisation adjacent to its new rare earths target and intersected anomalous lanthanum and cerium mineralisation, however the hole failed to penetrate the target.

Venture hopes to rectify the VMS focussed probe in future campaigns.

Venture Minerals Managing Director Andrew Radonjic said:“Clearly the Company’s diverse portfolio of projects affords the unique opportunity for such discoveries, due to Venture’s strategic landholdings in areas with the potential to host multiple mineralised systems, consequently leading to a higher probability of exploration success. The Company looks forward to keeping shareholders updated on the testing of these exciting new opportunities.”

Ventures’ Golden Grove North project is located roughly 450km north-east of Perth in Murchison Mineral Field of WA, however, more importantly, it is sited as being in the heart of elephant country, with the tenure positioned a 10km from 29Metals’ Golden Grove Copper-Zinc mine.

Golden Grove boasts a mineral resources of 58.4 million tonnes at 1.6 per cent copper, 4.4 per cent zinc, 0.7 grams per tonne gold and 30 g/t silver.

Importantly, Venture’s Golden Grove North project covers the northern strike extensions of the Golden Grove mine stratigraphy and over 25km of the largely untested ground prospective for VMS-style mineralisation.

The rare earths hits at Golden Grove North follows a September discovery of clay-hosted mineralisation at the company’s flagship Mount Lindsay tin-tungsten project in Tasmania.

Venture made the breakthrough after re-assaying shallow samples acquired from a clay zone at the operation’s Reward deposit and subsequent assays unveiled a raft of notable hits including 16.4 metres at 1028 ppm TREO from 31.9m and 7.5 m at 1287ppm TREO from a shallow depth of just 2m.

Interestingly the 16.4m hit also housed anomalous tin, a notable addition given the sample was acquired at a deposit where the company has already outlined a half a million tonne resource grading 0.9 per cent tin.

Rare earths are expected to form a crucial ingredient in the global transition toward cleaner energy solutions amidst the material's ongoing use in the construction of permanent magnets for electric vehicle motors.

The application, along with its use across the military, medical and robotics industries has experts tipping global demand for the material could reach 305,000 metric tonnes by 2025 some way above 2019 requirements of 208,000 tonnes.

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