Andrew Duffy

New seismic data has revealed that Triangle Energy may be sitting on a gushing 36 million barrels of oil and 535 billion cubic feet of gas as best-estimate prospective (P50) resources in the North Perth Basin. The company plans to drill-test two of its 12 new prospects that hold part of the volume, with wells kicking-off in the first half of this year.

In the next Bulls N’ Bears instalment on what made stocks jump in 2023, we look at Buxton Resources’ blistering start to last year with a 169 per cent share price jump on the back of graphite drill hits in Western Australia’s Gascoyne region. It went from 10.2c in early January to 27.5c the following month … and there was still more to come.

What made share prices rise in 2023? Bulls N’ Bears will take a look in the next few days, starting with Ardea Resources. Its stock jumped 162 per cent in a busy four days during the middle of last year on the back of a mineral resource upgrade and a mammoth prefeasibility study for its Goongarrie Hub nickel-cobalt deposits in Western Australia’s Goldfields region.

Neometals has revealed plans for its 50 per cent-owned subsidiary Primobius to deliver a fully-integrated hydrometallurgical refinery hub to Stelco, offering recycled battery metal products to the electric vehicle market. Primobius’ option to acquire up to a 50 per cent equity in the Stelco special purpose vehicle has been extended until June 30 in 2025 to align with the fully-integrated plant offer.

Reach Resources has added 16 new targets to its niobium-rare earths project in the highly-prospective Gascoyne battery metals province of Western Australia, about 260km east of Carnarvon, following soil assays. The company says a tenement-wide soils program at its Wabli Creek project threw up promising assays going 3860 parts per million total rare earth oxides (TREO), 2744ppm, 2425ppm, 2271ppm, 1976ppm and 1918ppm.

Legend Mining says seismic reprocessing and machine learning have boosted the exploration potential of its Rockford project within Western Australia’s rugged Fraser Range, about 250km east of Kalgoorlie. The new geophysical datasets suggest a depth extension of the Mawson nickel-copper-cobalt deposit that already has an indicated resource of 860,000 tonnes at 1.34 per cent nickel, 0.88 per cent copper and 0.08 per cent cobalt.

Lithium Universe says a study into its lithium carbonate refinery at its burgeoning Québec processing hub suggests it should produce a final lithium carbonate product grading between 99.5 and 99.9 per cent. The refinery is rated to 16,000 tonnes per annum, with an assumed feed grade of 5.5 per cent lithium oxide. Hatch has completed the study and a construction site has been selected.

88 Energy has expanded its footprint in Texas after agreeing to pick up an interest in Permian Basin production and development assets with best-estimate reserves of 0.68 million barrels of oil equivalent (BOE). The ground has nine producing wells that pumped out 6200BOE gross in 2022 – with an estimated net profit for the project of about $300,000.

Reach Resources says it has seen multiple thick, stacked pegmatites in reverse-circulation (RC) cuttings within the same rock package that hosts Delta Lithium’s Malinda and Jamesons projects to the east and west. The company says it has now completed 57 RC holes for 5282m at its Morrissey Hill lithium project in Western Australia’s Gascoyne region, with the majority intersecting pegmatites.