Barkly Rare Earths drills for bigger NT rare earths with 10,000m push

Barkly’s managing director Craig Wright (left) and general manager exploration Richard Hall discuss the first drillhole set up at Barkly Rare Earths' flagship project in the Northern Territory.

Barkly Rare Earths (ASX: BAK) has moved from prep to paydirt potential, with the drill rods now officially turning on a massive 10,000-metre campaign at its flagship Northern Territory Barkley rare earths project.

The drill rig is now hard at work on the first holes of a phase-one resource expansion campaign, marking a major milestone since the company's heavily oversubscribed $8 million IPO in January. With drilling finally underway, management says the focus has turned to building on its existing 40-million-tonne inferred rare earths resource.

That resource already features a solid grade of 2100 parts per million (ppm) total rare earth oxides (TREO). The current drilling program is designed to test shallow mineralisation near the existing resource, which remains encouragingly open in all directions.

The resource is defined within two optimised pit shells. However, drilling between these two areas previously intersected rare earths, hinting at the potential for significant lateral expansion across an intervening 20-kilometre corridor.

We are moving quickly to log,assess and dispatch the first samples for laboratory analysis. Barkly Rare Earths Managing Director Craig Wright

Barkly says the first samples from the campaign are scheduled for dispatch to the lab this week, signalling the start of what it hopes will be a robust period of news flow.

The early stage of the program will involve drilling a series of deeper 60-metre holes to provide a stronger geological framework for the current deposit.

The rig will then move on to the main event, a pattern of up to 400 shallow holes averaging just 25 metres deep, targeting the area dubbed the "Immediate Zone". This zone sits within an underexplored 20-kilometre corridor.

It is great to have the drill rig turning at Barkly and to see the phase one programme now underway. This campaign is an important step towards our goal of expanding the existing resource, with drilling focused on shallow targets around known mineralisation where we see good potential to add scale.   Barkly Rare Earths Managing Director Craig Wright

Additionally, Barkly is armed with two recent grants of $115,000 each awarded under the Northern Territory's highly regarded Geophysics and Drilling Collaborations program.

Whilst conceptual in nature, the exploration target gives a sense of the scale the company is chasing. It ranges from 200 million to 1 billion tonnes at a grade of between 1600 and 1900 ppm TREO. If the company can get anywhere near the lower end of that range, it could be sitting on something of global significance.

What makes the project compelling is the combination of potential scale and the high proportion of valuable magnet rare earth oxides, which account for 34 per cent of the total resource. These are the elements critical for manufacturing high-strength magnets used in everything from electric vehicles to wind turbines.

Adding to the project’s appeal are its notably low levels of the radioactive elements uranium and thorium, which can often complicate processing, and its “soft rock” geology, which should make mining and handling simpler and cheaper than at hard-rock deposits.

The drill program is being conducted by Colling Exploration, an Indigenous-owned company based in Pine Creek, NT and global mineral resource specialists RSC are managing the geological logging and sampling.

While the drill bit is spinning at its rare earths play, the company is also advancing its Buntine base metals project. The project has previously returned some impressive historical rock chip grades, including one per cent lead, 7100ppm nickel and 1760ppm cobalt.

Fieldwork at Buntine is now complete, with samples submitted for assay and results expected in the current quarter.

Barkly has also locked a savvy partnering deal with fellow ASX-listed explorer DevEx Resources on its Murphy West project in the NT. By spending $3.5 million over five years, DevEx can earn up to a 75 per cent interest in the project's uranium rights. This gives Barkly a free-carried exploration advantage on its own turf as it stays focused on its rare earths strategy.

With Barkly’s drilling now in full swing, a planned mineral resource update slated for the fourth quarter, its saddle bags full of $7 million in cash as at the end of the March quarter and the first batch of samples heading to the lab, punters should strap in for a steady stream of news as the explorer charges towards Christmas.

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