Ardea turns attention to critical mineral exploration

Ardea Resources has laid out exploration plans for critical minerals across its 4200-square-kilometre portfolio that includes the company’s Kalgoorlie, Perrinvale and Bedonia nickel projects in WA’s Eastern Goldfields. Whilst the focus has been on developing the company’s world-class Kalgoorlie nickel project Ardea will also be evaluating its ground for potential to hold multiple minerals.

The company’s tenement portfolio is one of the largest land holdings over ancient nickel-hosting ultramafic rocks in Australia. Importantly, its significant tenement package is also prospective for other types of economic mineralisation including lithium-caesium-tantalum, or “LCT” and rare earths.

Over the last 12 months, the company has identified multiple prospective settings for rare earths and LCT mineralisation in association with nickel laterite occurrences across its portfolio.

Ardea’s strategic tenement portfolio in the Eastern Goldfields of Western Australia remains underexplored, due to the historic focus on the globally significant KNP nickel-cobalt laterite resource.

Ardea is mindful of the significant value that exploration success can generate for the Company. On this basis, both feasibility study work and exploration on compelling targets will continue.

Whilst the association between the minerals is significant the company continues to prioritise ongoing feasibility work streams surrounding the company’s Kalgoorlie nickel project.

Ardea’s grand plan is to produce nickel and cobalt products for the lithium-ion battery sector using material sourced from the Goongarrie component of the company’s world-class resource of 830 million tonnes going 0.71 per cent nickel and 0.05 per cent cobalt. According to the Geological Survey of WA, when it comes to contained nickel, Ardea’s project is number one in WA with 5.8 million tonnes of contained nickel – surpassing BHP’s renowned 3.7-million-tonne Mt Keith operation by over 2 million tonnes.

Specifically, the company’s current focus has been on plant site sterilisation drilling, open pit mine design, resource optimisation to define an updated ore reserve, detailed engineering design, plant layout, defining capital and operating costs and quantifying the development sequence for process water bore fields.

However, now with expanded technical capacity, compelling critical mineral and nickel sulphide exploration opportunities will be evaluated with extra vigour.

Whilst it holds Australia’s largest deposit of nickel, there is science behind Ardea’s plan to look for other minerals. When it comes to national resources, according to Geoscience Australia, the western state is home to 99 per cent of all lithium, 60 per cent of gold, 54 per cent of tungsten, 43 per cent of bauxite – a rock high in aluminium content - 90 per cent of iron and a staggering 96 per cent of nickel.

With nickel as its primary focus, Ardea is likely relishing in the metal’s recent price action. Last week the price of nickel hit a six-month high of around US$30,000 per tonne. The last time nickel’s price was in similar territory was in May as the metal’s price was on a decline from spectacular highs of above US$100,000 reached amid an unprecedented short squeeze in March.

Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@wanews.com.au