Venus options out WA lithium ground

ASX-listed Venus Metals has granted a $50,000 option to Ascan Capital for the possible purchase of one of its Nardoo Hill lithium project tenements in WA’s Gascoyne region.

The move comes as Venus, along with Rox Resources, continues to focus its corporate attention on exploration activities at the high-grade Currans Find North gold discovery near Youanmi in WA’s Murchison district.

Under the terms of the Nardoo Hill deal, if the 90-day option is exercised by Ascan, a purchase price of $350,000 will be payable primarily by the issue of fully paid ordinary shares in a Venus-approved ASX-listed company and a 50 cents per tonne of ore mining royalty.

Located 840 kilometres north of Perth, the Nardoo Hill project area overlies the historical Nardoo Hill and Morrissey Hill workings, which sit within a pelitic and gneissic terrain, extensively intruded by pegmatite-hosted tantalum-lithium-niobium mineralisation that yielded a tonne of tantalum last century.

Earlier exploration efforts comprising field mapping and rock chip sampling focussed on a four square kilometre area centred on the Nardoo Hill prospect in the northern section of the optioned-up exploration licence.

The largest mapped pegmatite in this target area is believed to be flat-lying, with a kilometre of strike, more than 700m in width and containing a thickness of at least 30-60 metres, the company said. 

According to Venus, this target alone has the potential to produce a significant deposit of tantalum-lithium, if the area checks out.

This area returned a significant number of results with highly anomalous concentrations of lithium of over 0.1% lithium oxide, peaking at 0.27% lithium oxide.

Sampling also confirmed the presence of tantalum and niobium mineralisation associated with the pegmatite ore system at Nardoo.

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