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Nova Minerals weighs up golden opportunities
Mining
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- With gold prices forecast to hit US$3,000 an ounce next year, Nova Minerals (ASX: NVA, NASDAQ: NVA) is assessing early development options with Whittle Consulting to get its Estelle gold and critical minerals project in Alaska’s Tintina belt into production
- Nova is also targeting resource expansion at its high-grade RPM deposit while advancing feasibility studies
- As well as high-grade and close to surface gold from IRGS deposits, Estelle additionally hosts high-grade critical mineral antimony
Special Report: With gold prices forecast to hit US$3,000 an ounce next year, Nova Minerals is assessing options to develop its Estelle gold and critical minerals project in Alaska’s Tintina belt.
As investors assess the likely impacts of the Trump trifecta, Goldman Sachs is forecasting gold prices to reach a record US$3,000 an ounce next year.
The leading investment bank’s prediction came as bullion has bounced back nearly 2% to top US$2,600 an ounce this week. That followed a commodity price-buffeting US dollar rally in the immediate wake of Republicans winning control of the White House, House of Reps and Senate.
Goldman Sachs has now listed the yellow metal among its top commodity picks for 2025. Its reasons:
- foreshadowed Federal Reserve rate cuts that will cut the opportunity costs of holding gold,
- proposed tariffs driving demand for the historic inflation hedge,
- steady buying from central banks worried about rising US debt.
Stellar options
As gold miners look ahead to never seen before prices Nova Minerals has the luxury of three options to progress its Estelle project, with feasibility studies well underway – See Nova’s project optionality video here.
Nova’s project in Alaska’s prolific Tintina belt currently has a 9.9Moz JORC global resource with high grades close to surface, including a super high-grade zone of 180,000 oz at 4.1 grams per tonne (g/t) gold in the highest confidence measured category and a resource update to follow in short order. Across a 35 kilometre long mineralised corridor, which hosts rock samples grading as high as 1,290 g/t gold and 60.5% antimony, Estelle has more than 20 advanced gold and antimony prospects, four of them known large IRGS (intrusion related gold system) deposits.
That provides plenty of exploration upside, especially as less than 5% of the 514sqkm property has been explored and it’s in a province that’s home to a documented gold endowment of more than 220 million ounces. Some of the world-class discoveries in the neighbourhood include Barrick’s Donlin Creek Gold Project and Kinross Gold Corporation’s Fort Knox Gold Mine.
Aiming for scalable production, Nova is weighing up an initial small-scale low capex start-up mine through the higher grade RPM deposit as early as 2026 against a larger-scale higher capex expanded option which would include the bulk tonnage Korbel deposit as well as some of the other regional prospects. The first strategy would draw on internal funds and provide cashflow to fund the expansion of the larger Estelle project organically. The second would leverage the interest of larger gold miners as strategic partners.
Revving up RPM
Within RPM Nova has also been targeting resource expansion at the high-grade RPM North pit area.
CEO Christopher Gerteisen says the company is continuing to hit wide intercepts of high-grade mineralization, which bodes well for the upcoming resource update and PFS.
“This should prove positive for our upcoming studies focused on executing our current strategy to fast track development of RPM as a scale-able low capex/high margin starter operation that will generate the cash flow to facilitate future mine expansion plans and further unlock the larger Estelle Project which remains one of the largest undeveloped gold projects in the world, with significant upside remaining with gold, antimony, copper, silver, and other critical elements,” Gerteisen says.
“These latest results of high-grade mineralization will be included in the upcoming MRE and PFS, which we look forward to providing to our shareholders in due course..”
A 21-hole RC program carried out in 2024 extended the high grade core zone at RPM to surface with over 20 significant broad intercepts grading greater than 5 g/t gold and a high of 52.7 g/t gold.
These results, along with drilling from the 2023 program, will be incorporated into an upcoming resource update and pre-feasibility study for the RPM starter open pit mine.
Also to be added in will be improvements to the flow sheet from the Scoping Study, which already has proven simple metallurgy for easy gold liberation.
Antimony in mix
Another bonus of the Tintina belt is that it hosts significant antimony deposits and was a historical North American producer of the critical mineral.
Through the Stibium deposit at Estelle, the experienced management team at Nova is also looking at an option to develop a low capex antimony-gold operation in parallel, subject to US Department of Defense (DoD) funding.
Surface sampling at the deposit has returned high grades of both gold, at 12.7 g/t, and 60.5% antimony. With the US Department of Defense seeking domestic sources of the mineral, DoD funding could potentially kickstart production as soon as next year.
The antimony price has soared even more than gold this year, to US$32,750/t by the end of October from $US12,000t at the start of this year thanks to leading producer China’s shock move to restrict exports from September 15. That’s sparked a scramble for the critical mineral used in a broad range of military applications as well as smartphones and semiconductors.
“With RPM and all the other targets who knows how big this could be,” Gerteisen says.
This article was developed in collaboration with Nova Minerals, 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.
