Venture Minerals (ASX: VMS) will use a $1.05 million tax rebate to follow up on what it says is Australia’s best-ever rare earths intercept that it unveiled last month at its Jupiter prospect in Western Australia’s Mid West region.
The head-turning hit went 48m at 3025 parts per million total rare earth oxides (TREO) and Venture says its rebate will allow expedited drilling and metallurgical testing of ore from the area.
While other explorers have reported longer intercepts or higher grades in Australia, Venture says its headline hit stands above them all when the interception is subjected to the standard comparative procedure of multiplying the length in metres by the analytical value in rare earths grade. Its impressive hit came from a reverse-circulation (RC) hole drilled as part of a stage-one resource definition drill program at Jupiter, which is now confirmed to host rare earths-enriched clays.
Other assays from the program went as high as 2m at an eye-catching 20,538ppm TREO, 2m at 10,266ppm, 12m grading 4673ppm, 20m at 2519ppm and 24m going 2060ppm.
Venture says the results are similar to assays from a drilling program at Jupiter released in November last year that suggested the presence of a 20m to 30m-thick package of claystone-enriched mineralisation going more than 2000ppm TREO.
Jupiter is just one of a cluster of prospects making up Venture’s 1900-square-kilometre Brothers rare earths project that lies about 300km east of the port of Geraldton in WA’s Mid West region. Notably, the drilling completed to date at Jupiter covers only 40sq km.
As well as maturing the resource at Jupiter, Venture says it will spend some of its tax rebate on further research and development (R&D) activities to advance the metallurgical testwork on tin-rich borates from its Mount Lindsay project in north-west Tasmania.
The company says the program will investigate the extraction of tin, boron and iron from the borates, potentially increasing the tin recovery and producing a high-value boron by-product, resulting in additional revenue streams from Mount Lindsay.
It seems only fair that Mount Lindsay gets some attention from the timely cash injection given the Australian Tax Office paid Venture the packet as a result of R&D expenditure at the Tasmanian project. And by any measure, the cash injection seems like it will be put back into the ground in WA or Tasmania to grow Venture’s swag of prospects.
Punters seemed to be onboard with today’s confirmation of the exploration push. The company’s share price touched a high of 2.5c today, an increase of more than 13 per cent on yesterday’s close of 2.2c.
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