Doug Bright

The Environmental Protection Authority has given Image Resources conditional approval to push ahead with the development proposal for its Atlas mineral sands project in Western Australia's North Perth Basin. The company says that while the recommendation for its 100 per cent-owned project will now undergo a three-week review period, it believes it is now a matter of “when”, not “if” Atlas will proceed.

Infinity Lithium has secured a new 35-year lease on land that now expands the footprint of its San José project in Spain, following a new deal struck by its wholly-owned subsidiary, Extremadura New Energies. The company says its second major acquisition of rights and access to land that will be home to its processing facility is a milestone that provides long-term leasehold over 11 hectares.

Aurumin has bolstered its financial position at its Sandstone gold project in Western Australia's Mid West region, with a refreshed “drill-for-equity” agreement coming hot on the heels of it closing out on a convertible note. The company's rekindled deal with drilling contractor Topdrill will give management crucial choice and flexibility to increase drilling while preserving its cash.

Strickland Metals says ongoing re-evaluation work at its Horse Well project in the Western Australian desert shows its Palomino and Clydesdale prospects could be part of the same system and could even extend into its Marwari deposit – just 250m east of Palomino. The company says Palomino and Clydesdale exhibit shallow, high-oxide grades in initial drilling, but are untested along strike, down-dip and down-plunge.

Buxton Resources says samples from its Sun Devil and Aztecs prospects in Arizona have revealed geochemical signatures indicating the sites lie above the main copper molybdenum-enriched zone of a typical porphyry system. The 87 rock chip samples yielded results of up to 3.08 per cent copper, 156ppm molybdenum and 9.34g/t silver, strongly indicating the potential for a copper-porphyry target to exist at depth.

Terrain Minerals has unveiled what it believes are the early signs of a significant rare earths discovery, with high-grade gallium as an added bonus, at its Larin's Lane project in Western Australia's Mid West region. The company says the first results from its drilling at the project last December include gallium oxide grades of up to 57 grams per tonne.

King River Resources has revealed promising geochemical anomalism at its Providence target that lies along strike from a highly-regarded copper operation in the heart of Australia's Northern Territory. The company says the anomalism could be related to the style of Tennant Minerals' Bluebird-Perseverance deposit that has thrown up results including 61.8m at a grade of 2.3 per cent copper.

St George Mining has launched a new drilling mission designed to better define the rare earths footprint at its Destiny project in WA's Eastern Goldfields, where it has previously jagged up to 5125ppm TREO. Maiden drilling results at Destiny showed rare earths mineralisation in near-surface clay zones up to 42m thick throughout a 7km-long zone that remains open in all directions.

BMG Resources has applied for two additional exploration licences adjoining its granted Dragon project in Western Australia's West Arunta region – an emerging world-class niobium-rare earths district. It says data reviews have identified several areas where strong magnetic features are located next to major faults, which can be interpreted as being highly-prospective for potential carbonatites and represents priority niobium-rare earths exploration targets.

Strickland Metals says it has connected its Bronco and Konik gold prospects to form one big structure at its Horse Well play near Wiluna, making a bulk-tonnage target with a high-grade surface oxide zone. The company says it has made the crucial interpretation on the back of re-evaluating historic Bronco data in conjunction with its own geological information following its Konik discovery.

Radiopharm Theranostics says a new six-patient study shows its terbium-based treatment has superior potential to tackle prostate cancer than lutetium following a head-to-head assessment of the rare earths metals in its therapies. Management says the results from tests on patients with metastatic “castrate-resistant” cancer vindicate its development of next-generation, terbium-based radiotherapies for the treatment of the often deadly condition and other advanced cancers.

Chariot Corporation says it has significantly expanded its flagship Black Mountain tenure in Wyoming, adding 218 contiguous new claims to mark a whopping 206 per cent increase for its lithium project area. The company's new “BMX” claims almost enclose its original holdings, adding a strategic margin of between 1200m and 1600m around all but a 1500m-long section of State land on its north-west boundary.

Infinity Mining has topped up its total gold resource inventory to 63,000 ounces with the addition of a maiden 2700-ounce gold resource estimate from its Great Northern project at Leonora in Western Australia. The company has 10 mineral tenements in the Leonora district and is developing a portfolio of gold resources, with its eye on an initial 500,000-ounce target.

After selling the Millrose gold project for $61 million last year, Strickland Metals says its latest gold drill hits at its Celia South prospect out in the WA desert show geological potential for a similar operation. The company says results from maiden reconnaissance air-core drilling at the Warburton Mineral Field site include grades of up to 8.6 grams per tonne gold.

With uranium prices soaring globally, Toro Energy has reconfirmed its commitment to constructing its Lake Maitland pilot plant to test ores from three uranium-vanadium deposits within a radius of 110km south-west of Wiluna in Western Australia. The company says its recently-commissioned pilot plant will test improved beneficiation and hydrometallurgical circuits that it has developed from its bench-scale research.

Gold Mountain says it has put its foot on a big chunk of ground it believes to be prospective for rare earths and niobium in the Brazilian State of Minas Gerais, with 20 new tenements covering 388sq km. The tenure comprises four groups disposed across a tract of country surrounding and within an 80km radius of the world's biggest niobium mine in the Araxá region.

Some old-fashioned detective work has set Terrain Minerals on a pathway to try and emulate Sirius Resources' 2012 discovery of the hulking Nova-Bollinger deposit in WA's Fraser Range. Terrain says its search through old geophysical records identified an intriguing “eye-shaped” feature near its ground similar to the one that led to the Nova-Bollinger base metals discovery – just 300km to the north on the same geological structure.

Askari Metals has capped off its hunt for new exploration ground by staking a claim for the 260-square-kilometre Matemanga uranium project in Tanzania as the heavy metal's price surges on clean energy demand. The company's decision to pounce on the ground comes after its extensive geotechnical reviews that identified the area as a hot uranium target with significant potential.

Valor Resources has ticked off a second item from its targeted triad of lithium targets in Canada's booming Thunder Bay area in Ontario after completing its acquisition of the Jesaulenko project. Valor's 100 per cent acquisition of Jesaulenko comes just days after it also grabbed the nearby Frazer Lake lithium project and an 80 per cent share of the Hook Lake uranium play in Saskatchewan.

ABx Group is confident its subsidiary Alcore will achieve substantially-enhanced fluorine recovery after incorporating new equipment to deliver the ideal feed particle size for its reactor to handle. The company is awaiting results from a fourth phase of testwork after a ball mill and an ultrasonic vibrating screen were used to prepare a narrower range of particle sizes for feed material.

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.

Lindian Resources has revealed high-grade rare earths running up to 7.15 per cent TREO at its enormous Kangankunde project in the African country of Malawi following a geological mapping and sampling campaign. The company says its most recent work shows that outcropping carbonatite prospects both north and south of the project are highly mineralised with rare earths.

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.

Alma Metals has extended the higher-grade copper-molybdenum mineralisation strike at the Central Zone within its Briggs project in Queensland to about 500m, with new drill hits including 161m at 0.29 per cent copper and 71ppm moly from 22m. The intercept is part of a longer 242.4m zone beginning just 5.4m from surface and running 0.26 per cent copper and 60ppm moly.

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.

GreenTech Metals has produced grades of up to 2.36 per cent lithium oxide from drilling and sampling of its pegmatites in Western Australia's West Pilbara region – along strike from Azure Minerals' giant Andover lithium discovery. Andover has an exploration target estimate in the range of 100 to 240 million tonnes at grades between 1 and 1.5 per cent lithium oxide.

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.

A second round of testwork on Surefire Resources' breakthrough pre-treatment metallurgy has lifted the direct vanadium recovery from its Victory Bore magnetite resource in Western Australia to 97 per cent. The company says its proprietary method alleviates the vanadium industry's standard needs for high-pressure treatment or high-temperature roasting of pre-treated magnetite and brings significant capex and opex advantages.

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.

Aruma Resources is putting its shoulder to the wheel to expand the gold and rare earths footprint at its Salmon Gums project in Western Australia's Eastern Goldfields region after completing a 63-hole air-core drilling program. The campaign included 39 holes targeting rare earths, with the other 24 drillholes following up previous drilling to assess gold-bearing lodes at the company's Thistle gold discovery.

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.

An immune system protein being developed by Radiopharm Theranostics has for the first time been shown to have the potential to detect and target a specific cellular marker found in a wide range of cancers. The company's monoclonal antibody known as “DUNP19”, is a first-in-class therapy designed to track down, image and destroy cancer cells in human patients.