Stage-two drilling has kicked-off at Venture Minerals' (ASX: VMS) Jupiter clay-hosted rare earths prospect in Western Australia’s Mid-West region, as the company takes aim at a maiden mineral resource.
The company is chasing what it says was an “Australian record” hit of 48m at 3025 parts per million total rare earth oxides (TREO) in assays from stage-one reverse-circulation (RC) drilling at Jupiter – a feat it hopes its stage-two program will replicate.
The 300-hole stage-two program will be drilled across the prospect at a tighter 500m-by-250m spacing than phase one, with the aim of providing JORC-compliant data to support Jupiter’s maiden mineral resource estimate.
The highlights to date clearly demonstrate that Jupiter is emerging as a major rare earths discovery in the Tier One jurisdiction of Western Australia, located between Lynas’s existing plant and Iluka’s planned Rare Earth processing facilities.
Venture Minerals managing director Andrew Radonjic
Radonjic said more assays from the final batch of the stage-one program were due soon, in addition to others from the several batches of samples that will be submitted during the current drill program.
The impressive 48m stage-one drilling intercept was far from a one-hit wonder, with other assays going as high as 2m at an eyebrow-raising 20,538ppm TREO, 2m at 10,266ppm, 12m grading 4673ppm, 20m at 2519ppm and 24m going 2060ppm.
Earlier this month, Venture also confirmed Jupiter’s high concentration of valuable magnetic rare earth oxides (MREO) with a 2m hit grading a massive 5056ppm neodymium (Nd) and praseodymium (Pr) oxides from 24m. Notably, that high-grade NdPr lens also threw-up a TREO grade of an eye-watering 13,906ppm.
Nd and Pr are highly-valuable and in-demand light rare earths that are critical in the manufacture of permanent magnets used in electric motors and defence applications, in addition to decarbonisation efforts. Venture says Jupiter’s average MREO concentration is 23 per cent of the TREO in sections of clay that grade at more than 1000ppm TREO.
Other noteworthy assays from the company’s stage-one drilling efforts at Jupiter are 25m grading 2711ppm TREO with a 12m section going 4131ppm, 48m going 1658ppm including 10m and 14m chunks respectively going 2124ppm and 2044ppm, 72m at 1406ppm, 42m at 2154ppm and 36m at 1991ppm.
Encouragingly for the downstream processing side of the project, Venture says the concentration of radioactive elements uranium and thorium are extremely low.
The company says the assays received so far from Jupiter have revealed consistent high-grade zones of clays grading more than 2000ppm TREO in widths of 20m to 30m. When that grade cut-off is dropped to 1000ppm, Venture says the enrichments zones are up to 72m thick.
And drilling completed to date at the prospect only covers a small portion of Jupiter’s geophysical footprint, leaving plenty of ground-untested across Venture’s 1900-square-kilometre tenure.
Management says the ground, known as the Brothers rare earths project, contains a cluster of leads defined by geophysical data just begging to see the drill bit.
Brothers lies about 300km east of the port of Geraldton and just 250km from Iluka’s Eneabba Rare Earths Refinery that is scheduled to be in production next year. The project is also about 520km from Lynas Rare Earths’ operating Mount Weld rare earths concentrator.
With the final batch of assays from stage-one drilling on the cusp of being returned to Venture and the drill bit already spinning on stage-two holes, the company has a busy year ahead as it tries to reach for the stars with its assessment of Jupiter’s resource.
Watch this space for what is shaping up to be a solid news flow period for the company.
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