IGO farms into Impact Minerals’ Broken Hill nickel-copper-PGM project
Impact Minerals noted mineralisation at LBHG was increasing in thickness and grade at depth.
Nickel and lithium miner IGO (ASX: IGO) has given Impact Minerals’ (ASX: IPT) Broken Hill project in New South Wales the tick of approval after agreeing to farm into the asset, which is prospective for nickel-copper and platinum group metals.
Under the farm-in agreement, IGO can spend $18 million on advancing two tenements within the project over eight years to earn up to 75% of Broken Hill.
The earn-in is under two stages, with the first stage comprising IGO expending $6 million over four years to secure 51%. In the second stage, IGO can outlay a further $12 million over an additional four years to lock-in the 75% ownership.
Impact managing director Dr Mike Jones said the company was “extremely pleased” to partner with IGO, which he describes as “one of Australia’s most outstanding exploration companies”.
“We had a number of approaches from major companies for a joint venture after our last major drill campaign at Broken Hill but chose IGO because of [its] technical capacity, in particular [the] deep penetrating electromagnetic (EM) systems capability and experience, and also the way they have approached negotiations.”
Advancing Broken Hill
Dr Jones said Impact had noted a large amount of deeper drilling was required to advance the prospects it had discovered at Broken Hill.
“It is appropriate that a well-funded partner with excellent credentials is brought in to help fund what could be quite significant expenditures going forward,” he explained.
During its first year of the farm-in agreement, IGO plans to complete ground EM geophysical surveys using a deep penetrating SQUID system over the Moorkai Trend and Little Broken Hill Gabbro targets.
According to Impact, the Moorkai Trend is a 9km ultramafic-to-mafic dyke and chonolith complex that is “very poorly explored”.
In March this year, Impact revealed assays comprising nickel, copper and PGM in the Platinum Springs area within the trend.
Highlight results were 36m at 0.7 grams per tonne 3PGE (gold, palladium and platinum) from 3m, including 1m at 10.3g/t 3PGE, 2.3% copper, 3.3% nickel, 88g/t silver and 711 parts per million cobalt.
Another hole hit 5m at 5g/t 3PGE, 0.6% copper and 0.6% nickel from 64m.
Over at the Little Broke Hill Gabbro, maiden drilling unearthed anomalous nickel, copper and PGM over several kilometres.
Notable intercepts here comprised 51m at 0.3g/t 3PGE from 140m, including 5m at 0.5% copper, 0.4% nickel and 0.6g/t 3PGE from 162m; and 11m at 0.8g/t 3PGE from 101m, including 1m at 0.9g/t 3PGE and 0.15% copper from 105m.
Impact’s exploration plans
Impact says the farm-in over Broken Hill allows it to increase its focus on its Western Australian projects – Arkun and Doonia.
Doonia will be the initial priority with drilling to begin late this month or early next month.
This drilling program will test a 2.5km by 1km gold anomaly with magnetic features similar to Lefroy Exploration’s (ASX: LEX) Burns discovery 30km to the west.
“In addition [to Doonia], we are increasingly excited about the lithium, rare earth and nickel-copper-PGM targets we identified recently at our Arkun project which is rapidly becoming a very significant project for Impact in a very underexplored part of Western Australia,” Dr Jones said.