The race between two Western Australian juniors to establish what will essentially be the country’s first platinum group metals (PGM) mine has intensified during 2023, with both companies continuing to expeditiously advance their respective polymetallic projects.
Leading the pair is dual-listed Future Metals NL (ASX and AIM: FME), which earlier this year announced it had demonstrated “a credible metallurgical solution” for its Panton orebody in WA’s Kimberley.
Situated around 60 kilometres north of Halls Creek, Panton has been touted by the company as being “the highest grade in Australia and one of the highest grade undeveloped PGM projects globally”.
It is also a well-established target having, in the past, attracted the likes of Platinum Australia NL (which conducted some serious drilling at the remote site during the early 2000s), the publicly-listed Lonmin and Pancontinental Mining Ltd.
Meanwhile, well to the south of the state, Chalice Mining Ltd recently completed a scoping study on its Gonneville project, located some 70km north-east of the WA capital of Perth.
This stage of due diligence, the busy junior told the market ‒ which looked at indicative large-scale open pit development options ‒ outlined the potential for Gonneville to become a rare long life, low cost, low carbon green metals mine in a Western jurisdiction.
The study also predicted the project had the potential to become the lowest cost miner of PGMs, on top of being a significant producer of critical battery metals.
In terms of Panton, back in February Future Metals said after subjecting the project’s ore to flotation repeatability, consistent metallurgical PGM recoveries averaging 78 per cent at material concentrate grades and around 286 grams per tonne PGM from the high grade chromitite mineralisation ‒ which makes up 2.9 million ounces of the 6 million oz PGM contained in the JORC compliant resource – were established.
This was achieved through conventional crushing, grinding and flotation.
Furthermore, results from bulk ore sorting test work demonstrated a 97 per cent recovery of high grade PGM-bearing material, as well as the rejection of low grade ore and waste, thus improving the mill feed grade by 11 per cent and reducing mass by 13 per cent.
These results, Future Metals explained, demonstrated a significant de-risking for the future mining and processing of the company’s resource, while providing a credible path towards developing a low capital, high margin PGM-nickel operation.
Later, during the September quarter, the junior said an upgraded independent JORC mineral resource estimate (MRE) of 92 million tonnes at a combined platinum-palladium grade of 2 per cent for the contained 6 Moz had been established.
The MRE covered three separate units ‒ Reef, High Grade Dunite and Bulk Dunite – and included an estimate for Panton’s chromite content for the first time, positioning it as one of the only chromite projects in Australia “and one of the few in a top tier jurisdiction”.
For Chalice, the September quarter also brought some good news, with the junior’s scoping work, which focused on indicative bulk open pit development cases for Gonneville, indicating that a large resource and long mine life would provide significant leverage to a basket of green metals that were in strong demand thanks to global decarbonisation and urbanisation.
It was predicted the project would have world class sustainability metrics and produce low carbon intensity products, making a strong case for a future green premium.
Earlier this year the company announced an updated MRE estimate at Gonneville of 560 Mt at 0.54 per cent nickel equivalent (or 1.7g/t palladium equivalent) for a contained 16 Moz of PGM, 860,000t of nickel, 520,000t of copper and 83,000t of cobalt.
Moreover, continued step-out drilling at the project had seen high grade zones intersected around 900 metres down plunge of the resource.
Additionally, Chalice had started its prefeasibility study on Gonneville, with key workstreams focused on evaluating staged, high grade starter cases, improving metallurgical recoveries, further refining the geometallurgical characteristics of the resource and assessing early underground extraction options to target higher grade feed early in the mine life.
Looking forward, both juniors are hoping to expand their mineralised footprint via exploration.
In its September quarterly, Future Mineral pointed out it had entered an option agreement with Osprey Minerals Ltd (ASX: OSP) to acquire around 100 square km of highly prospective exploration tenure adjacent to Panton ‒ including the drill-ready Eileen Bore copper-nickel PGM prospect, where historic drilling had returned wide zones of shallow mineralisation, with a standout being 120m at 0.73 per cent copper, 0.29 per cent nickel and 0.86g/t PGM from surface.
This intercept included 16m at 1 per cent copper, 0.36 per cent nickel and 0.99g/t of PGM from 100m, as well as 96m at 0.7 per cent copper, 0.29 per cent nickel and 0.78g/t PGM from 24m.
To make its point clear, Chalice boasted it had “one of the world’s most recognised teams of mine-finders and they are focused on making further major discoveries”.
“We are about to embark on an expansive regional exploration program, representing the culmination of two years of reconnaissance work, which will involve drilling more than 10 new greenfield targets across our (over) 9,600 km2 West Yilgarn licence holding (also in WA),” it said.
“Reconnaissance soil geochemistry and geophysics undertaken over the past (roughly) 24 months has defined more than 10 new high priority nickel-cobalt and PGM targets.
“Drill testing is planned for the following priority targets over the coming months:”