Reach Resources has added 16 new targets to its niobium-rare earths project in the highly-prospective Gascoyne battery metals province of Western Australia, following soil assays at the site that sits about 260km east of Carnarvon.
The company says a tenement-wide soils program at its Wabli Creek project threw up promising assays going 3860 parts per million total rare earth oxides (TREO), 2744ppm, 2425ppm, 2271ppm, 1976ppm and 1918ppm. It says none of the new targets have previously been tested by the drill bit.
Reach says the top three targets make up a semi-continuous zone of strong anomalism extending more than 4km in length, which may reflect a common geological control. The rare earths mineralisation is within pegmatites, which are usually known for their lithium enrichment within the lithium-aluminium-silicate mineral spodumene.
Soil sampling is often excellent for identifying enriched areas that lie beneath, but will show diminished TREO values when compared to rock samples taken from outcrop.
Luckily for Reach, the Wabli Creek area does offer some outcropping pegmatites that have been the focus of historic rock-chip sampling, with assays going as high as 25,652ppm, 7200ppm, 3689ppm, 3173ppm, 2760ppm and 1874ppm TREO.
The company has combined the samples with its latest soil sampling dataset to create a series of targets that it will no doubt be following up with the drill bit truth diviner as soon as the weather it cools down.
Reach Resources chief executive officer Jeremy Bower said: “Not only have we had an expert geochemist identify a large extension to the previously reported high-grade Niobium and REE up to 14.3% Nb2O5 and 2.57% TREO, we now have targets on a separate second tenement in the Wabli Creek project area (Wabli Creek North). It is important to understand that the target area is substantial, and with multiple new targets with strong multi-element pathfinder geochemical signatures across both tenements (Wabli Creek and Wabli Creek North), the scale of prospectivity across the tenure is very compelling.”
Bower said the company remained committed to undertaking a methodical approach to the assessment of its ground in a bid to refine final targets ahead of drill testing.
The southern Wabli Creek tenement contains four priority-one targets, one priority-two target, two priority-three targets and three priority four-targets.
Reach says it has already mapped a swarm of outcropping pegmatites through about 2.5km in the area and believes the mineralisation continues under cover. And the recent soil sampling program does seem to suggest that is the case, with three priority-one targets close to one another.
Interestingly, the priority-one targets are separated by gaps with high TREO content in soil samples, but no rock chip data and management says a priority-one target must have anomalous soils and rock chips. So, it seems there is the potential for the gaps to join the priority-one targets together into a bigger lateral body if they contain outcrop with good rare earths assay numbers.
In the north of the project area at the Wabli Creek North tenement, the company has also identified two priority-two targets and one priority-three target. It says it plans to mature its evaluation of Wabli Creek through rock-chip sampling, mapping and ultimately, drill-testing.
Planning for next year’s fieldwork season is underway and Reach expects to have boots on the ground mapping the Wabli Creek tenements early in the new year. The potential of the area will then be confirmed by drilling assays once regulatory approvals, including heritage surveys, have been obtained.
That could have Reach reaching even further in a 2024 campaign.
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By Andrew Duffy
