Mining and Exploration

It has happened. Vanessa Guthrie told us she was not anxious about the twice delayed approval by Australia's Federal Minister for Sustainability, Environment, Water, Population and Communities Tony Burke to go ahead with Toro Energy's A$269 million Wiluna uranium mine, but the uncertainty must have cast a bit of a cloud over the Easter break.

Perseus Mining is very much a team effort: an overnight success that was 25 years in the making, as one of its founders Mark Calderwood has described it. Calderwood, the current chairman Reg Gillard and exec director Colin Carson have been taking an active interest in the under-explored mineral deposits of West Africa for that long, but it was not until 2004 that, having secured a couple of gold bearing deposits in Ghana, Côte d'Ivoire and the Kyrgyz Republic that they formed a company and floated it on the ASX.

Analysts talk of Vietnam becoming the fastest growing Asian economy, reaching a ten percent growth rate within the next twelve years with one of the main drivers being its natural resources. The country has significant known deposits of many bulk and niche minerals, including bauxite, rare earths, tungsten, titanium, phosphate, coal and iron ore but with the exception of its coal most current mining operations are on a small scale.

Namibia Diamond Trading Company (NDTC) was established in 2007, to sort, value and sell diamonds produced by Namdeb (the joint venture responsible for mining activities in Namibia) and more specifically to establish a viable downstream diamond cutting, polishing and jewellery design industry in Namibia.

Since 2005, Tridum e-Security has been providing high quality services and solutions to all manner of industry fields including the finance, enterprise, telecommunications, transportation, logistics, mining and government sectors.

Today the company is recognised for offering information and communication systems security and professional network infrastructure services, as well as being an expert provider of planning, implementation and maintenance solutions that are linked to banking software and hardware.

Founded as a family owned mining company in Spain in 1952, OSSA is today active across the globe and recognised as being a leading figure in the underground construction sector specialising in three core business segments, those being construction, energy and mining.

The agreement gives Monax three months to carry out technical due diligence on the project located within the newly defined Amber Zone of the Woomera Prohibited Area.

In reviewing available geophysical data for the area, Monax says it has discovered what it terms a ‘prominent gravity anomaly’.

On May 8 Canada Fluorspar Inc (CFI) announced the third set of results from the diamond drilling program at its Director Vein on the company's St Lawrence project in Newfoundland, saying it is encouraged by the data that validates the trenching results from last year. 

It was during the 1990s that professionals from Antofagasta Minerals Group made the discovery of a new deposit in the Sierra Gorda mining zone. Though it was accepted from the off that developing such an asset, located at the heart of the driest desert in the world, would be a hugely challenging undertaking, the work of thousands of people has contributed to the transformation of a geological resources into a new mining company called Minera Esperanza.

The two companies first entered into a strategic alliance in August 2012 with the stated aim being to acquire such projects in Brazil.

Under the first stage of the MoUs, the alliance will spend some $4 million on exploration, with BC Iron noting that the expenditure for each following stage would be dependent on the success of the preceding work to delineate economic mineralisation.