Doug Bright

Octava Minerals has the drill bit primed for a maiden nickel-copper-cobalt exploration program at its Yallalong project in Western Australia’s Mid West region, as part of a strategic collaboration with the CSIRO – the nation’s premier science agency. The campaign will test several significant anomalies identified through the CSIRO’s Kick-Start program, an initiative designed to assist innovative Australian start-ups and small-to-medium enterprises.

Gold Mountain has kicked off a new thrust into rare earths exploration at its Down Under project after amassing a giant land position of some 970 square kilometres in the prospective Jequie province in Brazil. The company has pegged its ground largely based on areas of anomalous thorium and uranium geochemistry, which is known to be associated with rare earths mineralisation in the province.

Valor Resources has secured the rights to acquire the 83-square-kilometre Frazer Lake lithium project in Canada’s Ontario province where pegmatite sampling has yielded 44m at 0.54 per cent lithium oxide. The company today revealed it had signed a definitive purchase option agreement to pick up Frazer Lake, which lies in the Thunder Bay region that has several significant lithium projects under development.

Meeka Metals’ mapping and sampling has highlighted what it believes is an important gold-arsenic anomaly within a 2km-long shear zone at its Murchison gold project, about 28km north-east of Meekatharra in Western Australia. Management says its surface geochemistry picked up the anomalism, which mapping shows as correlating with en echelon splays where previous drilling intersected grades of up to 54g/t gold.

Askari Metals says a detailed trench sampling campaign at its Uis project in Namibia has revealed a more significant lithium-rich pegmatite system than interpreted during initial mapping, with an average thickness of about 10m. The main pegmatite body has been mapped along a strike of about 2km and includes a south-west zone with an average thickness of 21m along 350m of strike.

Altech Batteries is getting closer to producing its Cerenergy solid-state battery pack that uses ordinary table-variety salt following an upgrade which has transformed its previously small trial batteries up to a 60kWh capacity. The upgrade came after Altech established a strategic joint venture with Germany’s Fraunhofer IKTS, which had initially developed battery packs with 5kWh and 10kWh capacities for testing.

Larvotto Resources’ $8m acquisition of the Hillgrove project in NSW comes with a million ounces of gold, Australia’s biggest antimony resource, gold-laced tailings and a mothballed processing plant and exploration package that has soaked up $200m. The project was put on the chopping block by administrators when Red River Resources experienced a fall-of-ground event at its Thalanga base metals mine in Queensland and never recovered.

DiscovEx Resources’ joint venture partner Carnaby Resources has drilled a high-grade intercept of 4m running a grade of 7 per cent copper at their Greater Duchess copper-gold project in Queensland. The latest hit is included in a longer intercept from the Duchess Central Lode of 10m going 3.3 per cent copper and 0.1g/t gold, with the steeply-dipping mineralised structure remaining open at depth.

Buxton Resources’ growing union with mining giant IGO has set up the company for a big 2024, with the latter pumping in $579,000 to help fund a new exploration campaign at their Copper Wolf joint venture project in Arizona. It comes on the back of a busy financial quarter where Buxton also advanced its Graphite Bull and Quick Shears projects in Western Australia.