Fly DMC: New boys off to ripper in hunt for Ravensthorpe nickel sulphides

After cancelling Christmas for the ASX’s nickel new boys, DMC Mining’s David Sumich says the team are already deep into a maiden exploration program at the Ravensthorpe nickel project.

DMC Mining (ASX:DMM) is airborne.

Led by highly-respected exec chair David Sumich, the team is already at work across its prospective 62km² Ravensthorpe tenure, having already crammed into a high-resolution helicopter to complete reconnaissance, electromagnetic and magnetic surveying.

A total of 522 line kilometres of data were acquired on a 100m line spacing in the NRG Australia survey.

“This is an excellent start to our 2022 exploration programme, and we intend to maintain the momentum throughout 2022,” Sumich said.

“The survey commenced a few days after DMC listed on the ASX and we are extremely pleased to have been able to complete this survey over the holiday period. We look forward to updating the market further.”

New listing, historic area

While DMC is fresh to the boards of the ASX after raising $5 million at 20c a share last year, it has built an enviable land position in a historic nickel mining region.

Its large EL74/669 exploration licence bounds FQM and POSCO’s massive Ravensthorpe nickel laterite mine on WA’s south coast, a multi-billion dollar project built by BHP just over a decade ago with decades of nickel resources in the ground.

It is also immediately south of the RAV8 nickel sulphide mine owned by ASX-Listed Nickel Search, where Tectonic Resources mined 468,000t at a super high grade of 3.45% between 2000-2005, trading the equivalent of 16,000t of nickel metal to WMC (now BHP’s Nickel West division).

It puts DMC in the right place to make a nickel sulphide discovery.

Right place, right approach

The Ravensthorpe project hosts about 15km of the strike length of the Bandalup ultramafics, a collection of host rocks known for holding Kambalda style komatiitic nickel deposits.

The DMC team were putting in the hard yards, long before listing on the local exchange, pouring through over data processing, modelling and targeting studies built from scratch and integrating the airborne EM data with historic geophysical, geological and geochemical information from previous owners of the ground.

It is not DMC’s only play, the company holds almost 1000km²of tenements across WA’s major nickel districts, including six high priority targets on the Fraser Range at the Trinity project, just 15km west of IGO’s Nova nickel-copper mine.