Public Company News

Terrain Minerals has stepped up its hunt for gold in Western Australia with exploration at its Smokebush and Wild-Viper projects identifying new targets for drill testing including recognised gold-bearing structures and extensive old mine workings. Drilling is scheduled to kick off in the third quarter of 2020; to be funded in part by the recent $3m sale of the company’s Great Western tenure.

Element 25 has secured a critical access agreement with the local pastoral lease holder, paving the way for the grant of the mining lease at its lucrative Butcherbird manganese project in Western Australia. The grant of the lease will allow the company to swing into the next phase of mining approvals and see the project head into the mine planning phase for production.

Unlisted Barton Gold has achieved its native title clearances for an imminent 10 to 12-kilometre drilling program on ground around its mothballed Tarcoola high-grade open pit gold mine on South Australia’s Gawler Craton. Barton is targeting mineral resource additions below Tarcoola’s existing pit floor and adjacent mineralised structures where previous drilling threw up numbers like 22m at 6.75 g/t gold from 15m.

Anglo Australian Resources Mandilla gold project near Kambalda is rapidly taking on a new complexion with seriously long, high grade intersections now rolling off the drill bit at will. Latest numbers include 26m at 8.29 g/t gold from 76 metres down-hole. Exploration, including DroneMag, has identified a range of new targets and extended the discovery zone to nearly 3 km of strike.

ASX-listed automotive panel and repair shop conglomerate, AMA Group, has locked in improved pricing with key insurers, effective from July after concluding service agreement negotiations with all key players. The renegotiated prices are expected to result in meaningful growth across the company’s Australasian network of panel repair workshops that already look set to benefit from a lack of public transport use during COVID-19.

Novo Resources has taken yet another step towards commercial gold production, revealing that it is in advanced discussions with process equipment supplier Steinert Australia to acquire a mechanical ore sorting unit to field test its conglomerate-gold ores in the Pilbara. The unit will be manufactured in Germany and is expected to be deployed into the Pilbara in the latter half of the 2020 field season.

Hot Chili is back in the field at its giant Cortadera copper-gold project in Chile with the Perth company poised to extend an extraordinarily long drill intersection that has already unearthed over 300m of mineralised porphyry. The drill rig fired back up recently following a COVID-19 shutdown and Hot Chili looks to be primed and ready to again test its drilling prowess.

ASX-listed PharmAust Limited has shown that the initial successful testing of its cancer fighting drug, Monepantel, against the COVID-19 virus may not have been a fluke, with new testing showing a “remarkable” 95% suppression rate in the infectivity of the SARS-CoV- 2 virus (COVID-19) in laboratory tests by both Monepantel and Monepantel sulfone. Testing was undertaken at Walter and Eliza Hall Institute of Medical Research in Melbourne.

Venus Metals Corporation has received a further boost to its war chest with battery metal focussed eMetals Ltd this week forking out $160,000 to complete the purchase of Venus’ Poona Lithium project in WA. The sale allows Venus to shift its focus to a range of new project areas in the fertile terranes surrounding the Youanmi mining region.

Kairos Minerals has more than doubled its Pilbara land tenure in the vicinity of DeGrey Mining’s extraordinary gold find at its Hemi project. Exploration will begin in earnest in the coming weeks with geophysics to be run over the northern tenure and drilling scheduled at the Fuego and Mt Yorke prospects in July. The new acquisition takes Kairos’ tenure from 384 to 774 square kilometres.

Perth’s Infinity Lithium has secured staged funding of up to €0.8 million from the European Union-based EIT InnoEnergy to fund phase one of a pilot plant at its San Jose Lithium project in Spain. EIT InnoEnergy is mandated to support the European Battery Alliance of which Infinity is a member, who is seeking to build a competitive and fully integrated battery supply chain in Europe.

ASX-listed TNT Mines is investigating a US-listing after its East Canyon uranium-vanadium project acquisition located in the US state of Utah, received positive investor interest from North America. TNT is looking at the OTC Markets Group as a site for quoting its shares to facilitate offshore investor demand and consequently enhanced liquidity. TNT said there were currently limited opportunities to invest in US-based uranium projects.