Javelin Minerals has renewed the exploration licences for its Husky and Malamute projects in New South Wales for an additional three years after getting the green light from the State’s resources regulator.
The Perth-based explorer considers both projects to have excellent prospectivity for scandium and rare earths, in addition to precious, base and battery metals.
Drilling at Husky last year confirmed the presence of weathered ultramafic rocks with geochemically-elevated levels of precious and base metals and already has follow-up activities planned for this year. Assays from the project show elevated geochemical results from six of the eight holes and management says that suggests it has again drilled into ultramafic units or the overlying saprolite.
The best assay results include 4m with 565 parts per million arsenic from 116m, 12m going 330ppm cobalt, 416ppm copper and 270ppm nickel from 19m, 5m with 346ppm cobalt from 23m and 5m with 1255ppm chromium and 923ppm nickel from 30m.
The Malamute tenement covers almost the entire ultramafic and mafic lithologies of the Minnemorong intrusive complex (MIC) where previous drilling by Javelin and historical air-core (AC) drillholes have intersected significant lateritic material containing geochemically-elevated precious and base metals anomalism.
An additional 2088m AC campaign completed last year to assess previously untested aeromagnetic features in the Albert East area provided more lithological and structural understanding to underexplored magnetic features within Malamute. The company says highly-encouraging platinum, nickel, cobalt and scandium levels were identified within the weathered saprolitic slices of the drilled intervals.
The best assay results included 4m with 565ppm arsenic from 116m, 12m going 330ppm cobalt, 416ppm copper and 270ppm nickel from 19m, 5m with 346ppm cobalt from 23m and 5m with 1255ppm chromium and 923ppm nickel from 30m.
Interestingly, just 4km to the south/south-east of Husky, Platina Resources recently sold its ultramafic-hosted scandium-platinum project to Rio Tinto for about $21 million.
The Platina deposit has a total mineral resource of 35.6 million tonnes at 405ppm scandium, equating to 22,000 tonnes of scandium oxide. Other metals present in the Platina deposit are platinum at 0.28 grams per tonne for 317,000 ounces, nickel at 0.1 per cent totalling 35,700 tonnes and cobalt at 0.06 per cent for 20,500 tonnes.
The north-south trend of ultramafics also extends north about 45km from Javelin’s Malamute project to Helix Resources’ spin-out company Ionick Metals’ Homeville laterite nickel-cobalt deposit that contains 17.9 million tonnes at 0.9 per cent nickel and 0.06 per cent cobalt. Helix describes Homeville as having excellent grades of nickel and cobalt, but it needs more tonnes to be of interest. A target of 60 to 100 million tonnes is considered necessary to underpin a long-term operation.
About 100km further south from Malamute, Sunrise Energy Metals’ Syerston laterite nickel-cobalt deposit contains 76.8 million tonnes at 0.73 per cent nickel and 0.13 per cent cobalt. The ultramafic belt also hosts Helix’s CZ copper deposit that has 2 million tonnes at 2 per cent copper.
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By Michael Philipps
