News that caught my eye this week No. 23

Some potential discoveries and some honorable mentions

Dec 08, 2024

This week has been quite interesting as a couple of potential discoveries have hit the tape. One stated as such and the other returning some interesting results.

Pethratherm is a company that I have followed for some time for their South Australian IOCG prospects. The Chairman is also responsible for the Prominent Hill discovery back in 2001.

The discovery announcement released as assays from the first few holes drilled across a Heavy Mineral Sands (HMS) prospect returned impressive titanium results. These were a confirmation of earlier aircore holes re-assayed by the company. The market really liked this one.

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I did not participate as I am not particularly interested in the HMS market and upon first learning about the story I looked up the MC of Sheffield Resources, a company that owns 50% of the Thunderbird HMS mine in the Kimberley to get a rough idea of what putting a deposit of this type into production gets you (as they did this in the last couple of years). The MC was about 70 million, so 140 on a whole-of-mine basis. SFX is not a perfect proxy as they produce Zircon and Ilmenite, as opposed to the Rutile and Leucoxene that PTR have found but that heuristic was the one I acted off of. It also seems like SFX have had a challenging ramp up.

As far as HMS go, this one is interesting as the enriched Ti minerals appear to be locally derived from a large, underlying anorthosite complex. Normally, these deposits are formed on present and paleo-coastlines where the enriched heavy minerals have many sources. The discovery demonstrates the team was creative in their interpretation of results tied to earlier non-HMS targeted drilling and field observations.

The other announcement of interest came out of Aldoro Resources where the company reported 262 m at 0.52% Nb2O5 (line 4) in a line trenching program on their Kameelburg Carbonatite in Namibia with the remaining lines awaiting assays and the program expanding from 7 to 22 lines. Diamond drilling is also taking place.

This is a interesting result and one that I am keeping an eye on. The market was also keen here.

The other big news of the week was the Northern Stars purchase of DeGrey’s Hemi. This is a great result for both DeGrey and Northern Star. Its also nice to see shareholders that backed an explorer see a payday.

I will be taking a break over the holidays with the weekly posts unless something particularly interesting comes about. I hope to wrap up some long form pieces during this time.

A very happy and safe festive season to you all!

The Tracker