Gold and REE-focused Dateline Resources will buy 80% of Argos, the largest known strontium deposit in the US, to bolster its critical minerals portfolio to meet future EV demand.

Strontium is a key component of permanent ferrite magnets, increasingly viewed as a low cost replacement for neodymium- based permanent magnets in EV motors.

Dateline Resources (ASX:DTR) will pay US$550,000 and hand over 5 million shares for the project, while at the same time establishing a new entity (Newco) to hold the four patented claims.

Argos is ~100km from DTR’s flagship Colosseum gold and REE project in the Cady Mountains region of San Bernardino, where strontium was discovered in the early 1900s and mined throughout the 20th century until 1959.

DTR has been quite the busy bee of late at Colosseum too, working to grow its mineral resource estimate (MRE) of 20.9Mt @ 1.2g/t for 813,000z, and has returned some impressive assays recently – such as a 63.2m intercept grading @ 10.28g/t from just 91.15m.

 

So why strontium?

At present, there is no strontium mine or carbonate production facility in the US, and DTR MD Stephen Baghdadi said the company’s interest in building out the project is in the element’s future in permanent magnets for EV manufacture.

“Major US carmakers, including Tesla, as well as EV magnet manufacturers, including Hitachi, are diversifying their production of permanent magnets for EV motors due to increasing costs, limited future supply and a concentration of REE processing and magnet production in China,” Baghdadi said.

“Lower cost, high-performance ferrite magnets contain strontium carbonate, and these will present an attractive solution to fulfilling growing global EV demand.”

The company collected a number of rock chip samples from Argos outcrops at Cady Mountains as part of its due diligence, and while the results are still being analysed, DTR reckons the initial look was sufficient enough to go ahead with the purchase of the project.

Once the assays come back the company said it will move to obtain approvals for an exploration program that includes RC drilling to assess the strike and depth extent of mineralisation in the project area, with a plan to commence exploration before the end of the year.

 

 

This article was developed in collaboration with Dateline 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.

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