As Chalice Mining continues to de-risk its Julimar nickel-copper-platinum group elements (PGE) project in WA, the company is advancing a dual strategy. What does this mean?
Chalice realises that alongside development studies and regulatory approvals for a potential mine at the Australian-first Gonneville deposit, the company needs to continue exploration activities across the broader Julimar strike length of more than 30km.
Exploration activities continued along the 10km Hartog-Dampier strike length during the December quarter as well as resource drilling at Gonneville.
Significant recent intercepts at Gonneville include 157.5m at 1.7 grams per tonne (g/t) 3E (palladium, platinum and gold), 0.2 per cent nickel, 0.1 per cent copper and 0.02 per cent cobalt (0.8 per cent nickel equivalent) at drill hole JD356. This included 48m at 4g/t 3E, 0.2 nickel, 0.3 per cent copper, 0.02 per cent cobalt (1.7 per cent nickel equivalent).
Chalice made three other intersections of 121.8m, 93.8m and 62.4m in length that boasted more than 1g/t 3E.
These results highlighted a potential deepening of the Gonneville resource pit shell at the northern end, with many of the assays intersecting sulphide mineralisation up to 650m beyond the current resource.
These findings will underpin an update to the Gonneville mineral resource estimate (MRE) towards the end of the March quarter. The current Gonneville estimate as of July 2022 is 350 million tonnes at 0.96g/t 3E, 0.16 per cent nickel, 0.1 per cent copper and 0.015 per cent cobalt.
Chalice said its ongoing Julimar scoping study continues to make good progress in evaluating the project’s scale, mining and flowsheet options.
“Metallurgical testwork during the quarter, focusing on flotation tails leaching and staged grinding, has highlighted the potential to materially enhance overall metallurgical recoveries,” Chalice said in its December quarterly.
“Thus the scoping study has been extended to allow both the new and planned metallurgical testwork results and the updated MRE to be modelled and incorporated.”
As for approvals, Chalice was recently granted an amendment to the conservation management plant (CMP) that was approved by the WA Government in late 2021, which has allowed for minor changes to be made to drill site locations to reflect updated geological information within the Hartog-Hooley target areas.
“Chalice also submitted an application for initial exploration drilling activities on existing recreational access tracks across the ~15km long Baudin-Jansz-Torres target areas at the northern end of the Julimar State Forest,” the company said.
This complements nearly 6000-hectares-worth of environmental baseline surveys across state forest at Julimar. Chalice said these surveys all meet Western Australian Environmental Protection Authority (EPA) standards for environmental impact assessment and provide information required to support referral of a potential mine development at Gonneville to the EPA.