Venture Minerals has received a more-than-handy boost to its coffers with $450,000 from the ATO under the research-and-development tax incentive program for the 2022 financial year.
The cash bonus will help the company recoup the significant expenditure it has committed to metallurgical testwork and studies at its flagship Mount Lindsay tin-tungsten project in Tasmania in the past year and will enable ongoing exploration on other important projects. Management is again planning to lodge a claim for the past financial year under the program’s guidelines.
In May, Venture announced the successful completion of a share purchase plan that raised $3 million and secured a further $250,000 through top-up placement provisions.
The company says it intends to use the funds for ongoing exploration, to advance metallurgical testwork at Mount Lindsay and undertake drilling and exploration programs at the company’s rare earths projects in Western Australia including its Vulcan, Kulin North, Kulin South, Bandy and Brothers targets. It will also allocate some of the money towards project generation and general working capital.
Not giving the grass time to grow under its drill rigs, Venture’s rare earths program was given a decent leg-up when its 2397m maiden drilling at its Greater Brothers project in WA’s Mid West region confirmed high-grade clay-hosted mineralisation. It reported a swag of solid hits in sections of up to 15m and at more than 2000 parts per million total rare earth oxides (TREO) within broader zones of up to 45m at about 1500ppm TREO throughout an extensive area.
All of the results came from composite samples of up to 5m, suggesting that better grades might be expected from resampling at shorter intervals. Management says the encouraging thickness and high-grade tenor of the results demonstrate, even at this early stage, the significant potential for the project to host a world-class, clay-hosted rare earths deposit.
Accordingly, Venture has pegged an additional 75 square kilometres of ground that it believes to be prospective for clay-hosted rare earths, bringing the total project area up to 1165sq km.
Although the Brothers project is situated well away from bigger WA population centres, the Geraldton-Mount Magnet Road and the adjacent gas pipeline constitutes an important potential supply route to the major port of Geraldton.
Venture has reappraised its approach to developing the Mount Lindsay project, which is already recognised as one of the world's biggest undeveloped deposits of its type. The resource base at Mount Lindsay is hosted within two magnetite-rich skarns that extend through a total strike of 2.8km and remains open at depth.
Additional indicated and inferred resources have been defined at the Reward and Stanley River South prospects, which extend through an additional 1.1 km of strike. The project is already classified by the Australian Government as a “critical minerals project”.
Recognising tin as a metal that is fundamental to the burgeoning battery revolution and with tungsten being a critical mineral, Venture has started a feasibility study on the Mount Lindsay underground resources. Management hopes to leverage off not only its completed open-pit feasibility studies, but also the recently-included tin and boron potential in the current resource base and – more extensively – throughout the greater Mount Lindsay skarn system.
Tin-borates have not been assessed in any previous mining studies and are considered by Venture to warrant greater attention, as boron minerals are critical in the solar panel industry.
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By Doug Bright
