ASX-listed Venture Minerals has spun the drill bit on a new priority rare earth and tin target at its flagship Mount Lindsay project in Tasmania after discovering a 1,200m-long ground anomaly at the site .
The company coined the “Cruncher” prospect and says it’s loaded with high doses of praseodymium and neodymium, materials essential for building electric vehicles and wind turbines.
According to Venture, the rare-earth anomaly is nestled within a larger boron soil anomaly which, along with Cruncher, is open to the north.
Boron is commonly used in the medical industry for applications such as eye drops and mild antiseptics, but management says the mineral is also a strong indicator of tin mineralization.
Notably, the Tasmanian government will contribute $50,000 to the first hole drilled at Cruncher under its Exploration Drilling Grants Initiative program.
The discovery marks the company’s second rare earth discovery at Mount Lindsay this year following the detection in September of rare earths in the project’s Reward deposit about 1.3 km west of Cruncher. Venture made the breakthrough after reanalyzing shallow samples bagged in a clay zone at the mine.
A subsequent drilling campaign yielded a string of notable intercepts including 16.4 meters at 1028 parts per million total rare earth oxides, or “TREO” from 31.9m and 7.5m at 1287 ppm TREO from a depth of just 2 m.
Interestingly, the 16.4m strike also contained anomalous tin, a likely inclusion given that the sample was acquired from the Reward deposit where Venture already has a foothold in a half-million-tonne resource. grading 0.9% tin.
Some of the longer hits from the September campaign at Reward include a 2.8m interval ranging from 2486ppm TREO from 65.7m in a wider 19.3m plot ranging from 725ppm TREO from of 64.2 m. The intercept hosted a richer 2.8m interval ranging from 2486 ppm TREO from 65.7m.
Highlights from another hole include 2m with 1770 ppm TREO from 81m.
Encouragingly, Venture believes that Reward’s rare earth mineralization is open in all directions and could be mined in combination with the site’s tin inventory.
Cruncher’s discovery adds another rare earth asset to the company’s burgeoning roster and follows a similar discovery at its Golden Grove North zinc-copper-gold project in WA’s Midwest a while ago. more than a week.
The discovery at Golden Grove sent Venture’s share price starting at a price of 0.022c. to a maximum of 0.033c. The price has since cooled to around 0.026c.
The discovery as Golden Grove was exemplified by several samples showing grades greater than 1% TREO with additional inclusions of praseodymium and neodymium oxide reaching 5,460 and 14,575 ppm, respectively.
Venture says its new rare earth target at Golden Grove is also supported by historic soil samples that were originally evaluated for volcanic massive sulphide type mineralization. However, upon further inspection, the samples returned abnormal results of the rare earth elements lanthanum and cerium.
Mount Lindsay presented Venture with another rare earth opportunity with the Cruncher target, opening up the Livingstone-Reward zone with a second prospective zone parallel to the host sequence of the Reward rare earth discovery.
With the 12.5% rare earth mineralization discovered at Golden Grove North, the company’s shareholders are now exposed to three rare earth prospects generated in the past two months and all within the company’s existing projects.
Venture’s Mount Lindsay asset is home to approximately 150 square kilometers of land in North West Tasmania and is considered one of the largest undeveloped tin prospects in the world. The project contains approximately 81,000 tonnes of contained tin and a tungsten resource of approximately 3.2 million units of metric tonnes of tungsten trioxide.
After another rare earth discovery at Mount Lindsay and another at its Golden Grove North project in WA, Venture could be well on its way to reinventing itself as a key player in the new energy space.
Is your ASX-listed company doing anything interesting? Contact: matt.birney@wanews.com.au
