New World’s upcoming demerger of its cobalt assets will include two newly acquired high-grade but underexplored projects in the Idaho Cobalt Belt.

The company has executed an agreement to acquire the Black Pine cobalt-copper-gold project and also secured 107 claims covering 2,100 acres that make up the Panther Creek cobalt project.

Small-scale historical production was carried out at Black Pine between 1947 and 1962 with about 6,000t of ore mined at 2% copper from underground workings while historical workings are present at the Sweet Repose prospect at its new Panther Creek project.

Both projects will be included in New World Resources’ (ASX:NWC) planned demerger of its US cobalt assets into a new ASX-listed company to be named Koba Resources that will allow New World to focus on its flagship Antler copper project in Arizona.

The company has engaged Euroz Hartleys and Peloton Capital as joint lead managers for a proposed $8m initial public offering of Koba at an issue price of 20c per share.

Existing New World shareholders will have a piece of the action in the new company with New World carrying out an in-specie distribution of 20 million Koba shares. They will also be entitled to participate in a priority offer that forms part of the IPO.

Listing of Koba is expected in the first quarter of 2022.

Black Pine and Panther Creek

Besides the historical production, strong, coherent cobalt and copper soil anomalism was delineated at Black Pine in the 1990s over more than 5km of strike.

Assays from the drilling of 196 previous holes totalling 17,935m also returned encouraging results such as 6.2m grading 0.02% copper, 0.606% cobalt and 6.4 grams per tonne (g/t) gold; 4.3m at 7.47% copper, 0.019% cobalt and 0.78g/t gold; 15.5m at 2% copper, 0.004% cobalt and 0.14g/t gold; and 1.2m at 0.02% copper, 1.43% cobalt and 1.37g/t gold.

However, New World noted that most of the previous exploration and drilling targeted copper rather than cobalt with no drilling since 1996.

This offers considerable potential to rapidly expand the known mineralisation, which is open in all directions, and follow up on numerous untested prospects.

Panther Creek is immediately adjacent to Jervois Global’s Ram Cobalt Deposit, which has current resources of 4.7Mt at 0.53% cobalt, 0.73% copper and 0.48g/t gold and is expected to start production in 2022, and the historical Blackbird Cobalt Mine where 5Mt of ore grading 1.5% copper and 0.6% cobalt was mined.

Historical underground workings are present within the Panther Creek project at Sweet Repose, where cobalt and copper mineralisation is present in a shear zone that extends over several hundred metres, from which samples assaying up to 0.45% cobalt have been returned.

Extensive cobalt, copper and gold anomalism is also evident in historical soil geochemistry data covering much of the new project area, with samples from other prospects in the project area assaying up to 1.13% cobalt.

Despite this, the project remains significantly underexplored, with no records of any previous drilling.

 

 

 

This article was developed in collaboration with New World Resources, a Stockhead advertiser at the time of publishing.

 

This article does not constitute financial product advice. You should consider obtaining independent advice before making any financial decisions.