Titanium samples deliver new milestone for Petratherm at Muckanippie
Mining
Mining
Special Report: After a watershed year that saw Petratherm emerge as one of the top performing small caps on the ASX, the mineral sands explorer has delivered a stunning start to 2025 by confirming high-grade titanium samples from its Muckanippie site in South Australia.
Petratherm (ASX:PTR) has seen its shares rise close to 1200% in the past year, most of that since mid November – the $120-million-capped ASX junior has risen from a share price of just 5c on November 14 to 44c on Monday morning.
A new test scanning heavy mineral concentrates from the initial mineralogical heavy mineral separation test work, produced from samples taken in the milestone maiden drilling program at the site in the northern Gawler Craton, showed the concentrates contained over 97.9% valuable heavy minerals in 10 of the 12 samples analysed with no deleterious elements detected.
The test at Diamantina Laboratories in Perth involved modal analysis, to identify the minerals present and their concentrations.
Samples from the main zone averaged a 25.3% rutile product containing high-titanium leucoxene and rutile with an average TiO2 grade of 93%, with other ore from the main zone comprising pseudorutile with a TiO2 content averaging 75.4%.
That’s significant given the paucity of new rutile discoveries made in recent years and even decades. While demand continues to grow for titanium – listed as a critical mineral in Australia, the US and Europe – new discoveries of natural rutile have been few and far between.
Rutile is regarded as supply constrained, meaning customers will be keen to suck up additional supply as it emerges. That places a premium on Muckanippie and its key Rosewood discovery, should PTR maintain the momentum of recent successes.
“The initial mineralogy results from the Rosewood prospect are outstanding,” Petratherm CEO Peter Reid said.
“Muckanippie continues to surprise, and this grass roots discovery is now emerging as a high-quality project with enormous potential to be a significant source of high-value titanium minerals and transformational for the company.
“This outcome is a key step forward for the Muckanippie titanium project and the Company is now working hard on the next phase of ore characterisation. In parallel, we look forward to the next phase of step out exploration drilling at Rosewood.
“We now eagerly await the heavy mineral results from a further 45 drill holes and look forward to providing these as they come to hand.”
Rutile and other titanium dioxide feedstocks are seeing growing demand from technology and defence applications such as electric vehicles, battery storage, wind turbines and as a steel alloy – as well as its largest market in pigments.
But Muckanippie could, like many other heavy mineral sands deposits, have potential to host large accumulations of other commodities including zircon, with mineralisation potentially extending north of existing drilling.
Zircon is highly prized for use in the ceramics sector, with an improving global economy likely to stoke demand from property construction.
Drilling at the northern end of the 1.6km long Main Zone traverse showed a zircon-bearing sediment in drill hole 24RW011.
While the unit is lower grade in terms of heavy minerals content at 8m at 0.85% HM, the samples returned 20.9% and 14.5% zircon with high rutile product of 77.8% and 26% respectively. It remains open to the north, suggesting more drilling is required to outline just how rich Muckanippie’s zircon potential could be.
As noted by Reid, heavy mineral content assay results are still to come from another 45 drill holes collected by PTR from both its 100% owned EL 6855 tenement, the source of all the samples reported on Monday, and its joint venture with Narryer Metals (ASX:NYM) to the west on EL 6715.
Expected in about three weeks, the samples have been taken from seven widely spaced drill traverses over an area of 8km by 2km.
The recent results of the modal analysis, demonstrating high-value titanium oxides at Rosewood, are a significant milestone in the advancement of the project which justifies the next stage of metallurgical assessment, PTR told the market.
That includes benchtop and small-scale lab testwork to assess the recovery rates of heavy minerals in a final concentrate product.
“These will include magnetic and electrostatic separation of HM concentrates, similar to those used in existing HM mining operations, to determine what titanium oxides products can be produced for further marketing and evaluation,” PTR said.
This article was developed in collaboration with Petratherm, 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.