Resources Top 5: Pure Minerals leads whopper day of deals, discoveries

Pure Minerals inks big deal with battery maker LG Chem
Superior Resources, Dampier Gold make gold discoveries
American Rare Earths will kick off maiden drilling in November

Here’s your top ASX small cap resources winners in morning trade Thursday, October 15.

Battery metals play Pure Minerals (ASX:PM1) has inked an offtake-potential project funding deal with the world’s biggest electric vehicle battery maker, LG Chem.

Pure Minerals, which surged ~60 per cent in early trade, is now up 150 per cent over the past six months.

This Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) – a non-binding agreement that comes before a legal one – is for the supply of 10,000t nickel and 1,000t cobalt each year from Pure’s TECH Project in Queensland.

The problem (if you can call it a problem) is that Pure Minerals was only planning to produce 6000t of nickel and 650t of cobalt each year.

As part of the MOU, the two companies will look at boosting the size of the TECH Project to meet the greater demand of LG Chem.

This will include consideration of “financing of the TECH Project by way of a prepayment”, Pure Minerals says.

South Korean company LG currently controls about a quarter of the global market for electric vehicle batteries.

It is boosting production to meet a surge in orders, driven by stricter environmental regulations in Europe and China, according to the Financial Times.

“With LG Chem’s involvement, there is now potential to scale up the size of the TECH Project to one which offers even more attractive capital efficiency,” Pure Minerals chief exec Stephen Grocott says.

“We will immediately commence work on this. Once the plant size is finalised, we will be able to formally commence Bankable Feasibility Study and project approvals.”

Dampier Gold (ASX:DAU) made a new gold discovery with a wide spaced, early stage drilling program at the greenfields (unexplored) Browns Dam prospect, part of its flagship Zuleika project in WA.

Peak results of 5m at 3.1 g/t gold from 38m are very significant – mainly because holes of this ‘first pass’ program were drilled 40m apart in lines 500m apart, which makes it easy to miss something important.

Now Dampier has targets for deeper, more focussed drilling.

“This part of the Zuleika Shear has not previously been tested and now we have established there are significant gold bearing structures with high grade intersections and gold anomalies, within a large area still to be tested,” Dampier managing director Annie Guo says.

“These results in the weathered zone also provide a clear pathway for Dampier’s future drilling to test the deeper fresh rock, which typically hosts the large high-grade gold deposits along the Zuleika shear.

“Dampier’s technical team is working on a further follow-up Aircore drilling and Reverse Circulation drilling to test for extensions to these excellent first pass results.”

Superior Resources’ (ASX:SUP) ~100,000oz Steam Engine gold deposit is about to get a lot bigger.

Solid new drilling results, like 5m at 4.1 g/t gold just 35m from surface, extend Steam Engine by 150m to 550m in length.

It also remains ‘open’, which means Superior doesn’t know where the gold ends yet.

“Our recent holes were drilled at slightly deeper levels beneath the historic holes and demonstrate that the northwards continuation of the high-grade Steam Engine Lode was clearly missed by previous explorers,” Superior managing director Peter Hwang says.

“The growth-potential presented by the Steam Engine Lode together with the Eastern Ridge Lode is significant … we will continue exploratory drilling to expand the mineralisation down-dip and further along strike.”

There weren’t many surprises in Metallica Minerals’ (ASX:MLM) Annual Report, but the beleaguered mineral sands explorer/shell company still shot up 52 per cent in early trade.

Maybe there’s an acquisition on the horizon?

And first drilling will kick off at American Rare Earths’ (ASX:ARR) La Paz project in November.

The stock, formerly cobalt play Broken Hill Prospecting, has been flying since it acquired the La Paz rare earths project in August from Zenith Minerals (ASX:ZNC).