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Pursuit picks up vanadium ground in “most attractive” Scandinavia
Mining
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Copper and zinc player Pursuit Minerals is venturing into vanadium in Finland and Sweden.
The company (ASX:PUR) has secured mineral reservations covering the Koitelainen and Karhujupukka vanadium projects in northern Finland.
Finland was recently named the most attractive mining jurisdiction in the 2017 Fraser Institute Survey.
Pursuit has also lodged exploration licence applications for several projects in Sweden.
Managing director Jeremy Read says that with the world moving to renewable energy, and several European countries looking to phase out internal combustion engine vehicles by 2040, vanadium-based batteries will have an increasingly important role to play in energy storage in the very near future.
“With the localisation of the energy grid, due to increasing renewable energy production, and global transport fleets moving to electric vehicles, the world is requiring more vanadium due to its use in vanadium redox batteries,” he said.
Although Pursuit is venturing into vanadium, the company is still planning to continue to focus just as strongly on its copper and zinc projects in northern Queensland.
“It’s a bit of a dual strategy really because the drilling that happens in Scandinavia gets done over the winter time – so our summer and that’s the time period with our northern Queensland projects we can’t work,” he told Stockhead.
“So they work actually well together.”
Pursuit, which re-listed on the ASX in August last year and now has a market cap of just $7 million, is hoping the acquisition will give the company the boost its been looking for.
The company reached a peak of 32c on its first day back on the bourse in late August, bottomed at 10c in December and is currently trading at around 14.5c.
“Last year we started off with a bit of a bang when the company re-listed and we had some early success and then the drill programs finished up north and it was sort of quiet for a while,” Mr Read explained.
“But there’s a huge amount of interest in vanadium at the moment and we’ve been able to put our foot on some pretty substantial historical sites of mineralisation.”
The projects in Finland host historical resources that Pursuit plans to convert to JORC-compliant resources once it can get on the ground and drill.
According to Mr Read, the mineralisation is shallow and remains open.
“Some of that mineralisation comes to surface,” he noted.
“So we’re definitely looking at an open pittable potential development scenario. We’re not chasing things at hundreds of metres of depths.”
Pursuit will begin drilling at its north Queensland projects in three weeks.
