Public Company News

Hot Chili is now a copper and gold producer and whilst it has spent a lot of time, money and effort proving up its Chilean projects, it spent nothing on CAPEX to start mining. Spurred on by fabulous copper and gold prices, Hot Chili has hit a big milestone with the start of mining at Productora four months ahead of schedule.

ASX-listed base metals hopeful, Blackstone Minerals, continues to put runs on the board in northern Vietnam as its company-owned drill rigs continue their run of success at the Ban Chang deposit within the Ta Khoa nickel-copper-PGM project with more lucrative looking sulphide nickel mineralisation presenting in the samples. Blackstone is chasing massive sulphide veins similar to its nearby Ban Phuc deposit, where previous owners produced 20,700t of nickel, 10,100t of copper and 67,000t of cobalt between 2013 and 2016.

Impact Minerals now has around $5.5m in its war chest after raising $3.24m in a heavily oversubscribed placement to follow up on past drilling that unearthed possibly the best platinum group result ever produced in Australia near Broken Hill in NSW. The project boasts a smorgasbord of mixed metals headlined by platinum, palladium, gold, nickel and copper.

Podium Minerals has kicked off on a resource drilling program at its Parks Reef platinum group metals deposit near Cue. The company aims to link up and fill in the gaps in the Parks Reef resource where there is little to no existing drilling and extend the total modelled resources over a combined length of 8.5 kilometres.

ASX-listed Perth based Delecta Ltd has boots on the ground now at its REX uranium-vanadium project in the US where its field team has picked up some interesting rock chips grading up to 0.53 per cent U3O8. The samples also returned up to 1.36 per cent vanadium pentoxide, underscoring the historical uranium-vanadium occurrences in the region.

Godolphin Resources is gearing up for the second phase of drilling at its Mount Aubrey project in the revered copper-gold Lachlan Fold Belt in NSW, as it looks to join the plethora of gold hopefuls clamouring to transform historic mothballed mining projects into lucrative money makers once again. Earlier this year, Godolphin ploughed in 14 RC drill holes at Mt Aubrey, most of which intersected gold mineralisation.

ASX-listed Norwest Energy, along with JV partner and Operator, Mineral Resources, has lodged the environmental plan to drill its highly anticipated Lockyer Deep gas exploration well located near Dongara, north of Perth. Norwest and Min Res are targeting a prospective resource of up to 1.2 trillion cubic feet of gas at the prospect that lies only 15kms north of Strike Energy’s huge West Erregulla gas find.

ASX-listed base metals explorer, Legend Mining, has continued to deliver broad hits from aircore drilling at its Mawson nickel-copper sulphide discovery within its Rockford project in WA’s revered Fraser Range district. The Perth-based company’s current aircore drilling program rattled off another half a dozen broad intervals this week ranging from 21m to 43m with anomalous nickel and copper values.

Lithium Australia’s patented “LieNA” process that could potentially change the economics of lithium processing by turning lithium waste ore into battery chemicals, is poised on the brink of commercialisation as the company looks towards its first-generation pilot-plant. LieNA takes fine spodumene ore that otherwise may have become waste and concentrates the lucrative lithium phosphate end-product by up to and greater than 85 per cent.

Tietto Minerals has continued its impressive run of success in Cote d’Ivoire, Africa with ongoing drilling returning high-grade gold intercepts from the depth extensions of the 2.15 million-ounce AG gold resource.

Lithium Australia said its 50 per cent owned lithium battery manufacturing subsidiary, Soluna Australia, is set to turn a profit by the end of December this year. Its modular lithium battery systems that can be linked to roof mounted solar panels can store unprecedented levels of energy for use at a future time when the sun may no longer be shining.

Classic Minerals has taken the plunge in a bid to generate some early cash flows from its Kat Gap project in WA, buying a mobile gravity gold concentration plant for the on-site processing of ore. The high-grade discovery at Kat Gap in the Southern Cross region includes a 1m drill hit going 10 ounces of gold to the tonne.