Terrain muscles in on rare earths hot spot

Terrain Minerals has been granted three new exploration tenements covering 320 square kilometres of the highly prospective ‘rare earths province’ near Esperance. The largest new tenement is surrounded on three sides by Meeka Gold Limited that recently released results showing large areas of regolith hosted rare earths, including a strong and extensive anomaly adjoining Terrain’s ground to the south.

Terrain has called the new project, that is mostly agricultural freehold land, Lort River. Fifty kilometres north of Esperance, the region is fast becoming a focus for clay-hosted rare earth elements exploration and is now tightly held.

The company is undertaking a comprehensive data review to design detailed exploration and is planning to update the market when the findings are available.

Last month neighbours Meeka Gold released results showing extensive regolith-hosted rare earths mineralisation in tenements surrounding Terrain’s largest and westernmost ground.

Meeka also showed results of up to 540 parts per million total rare earths elements, or TREO, close to the southern boundary of the Terrain licence and up 526 parts per million TREO adjacent to the northwest corner of the Terrain ground. The southern boundary zone returned Meeka Gold an extensive cerium anomaly above 160 parts per million.

Meeka Gold has shown extensive TREO mineralisation north and south of Terrain’s new tenements.

Regolith-hosted rare earths originate through weathering of underlying felsic rocks such as granite and gneiss. Elsewhere in the Esperance province explorers believe the underlying geology is a good source of rare earths and exploration results to date demonstrate the process of mobilisation and subsequent accumulation within the regolith horizon.

Hard rock rare earths deposits are not yet known in the Esperance province and are just starting to get more exploration attention.

Regolith-hosted rare earth deposits are also known as ion-adsorption deposits because the minerals physically adhere to the clay particles.

As a result, between 60 and 90 per cent of the rare earth elements can be recovered and extracted by ion-exchange leaching with dilute electrolyte. Ore zones are generally 5-20m thick and low grade, 0.04-0.3 per cent rare earths. Mining and processing costs are low giving rise to economic production.

In addition to the new Lort River project Terrain holds emerging gold exploration projects at Wild Viper near Leonora and Smokebush near Paynes Find in WA. The company also holds one million shares in ASX listed Red 5 whose Great Western gold project adjoins Wild Viper.

Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@businessnews.com.au