www.blackfireminerals.com.au
Black Fire Minerals' (ASX: BFE) corporate strategy includes a Mining House structure that allows both direct participation in and investment within the resources industry. The company's primary commodity focus is gold, copper and strategic minerals.
Black Fire currently has three active projects, the Longonjo Rare Earth (REE) Project in Angola, the Mystique Gold JV in Western Australia and the Karibib Lithium Project in Namibia, and is actively assessing new opportunities in Australia, Asia, the Americas and Africa.
Black Fire Minerals encouraged by extensive rare earth anomaly at Longonjo in Angola
Black Fire Minerals (ASX: BFE) would have received significant encouragement from the first 174 assays from an extensive 575 soil samples covering the open extensions of the Longonjo rare earth project soil anomaly.
The Longonjo project is located in central Angola. The rare earth element anomaly, which based on historic sampling covered an area of 2 kilometres by 1 kilometre, has been extended a further 500 metres to the south-east and remains open.
The latest samples are the first at Longonjo that have been assayed for the full suite of rare earth elements with the results confirming highly elevated neodymium (peak 0.70% Nd2O3) and praseodymium (peak 0.18% Pr6O11).
Importantly, the remaining 401 soil samples are expected in the next week, which cover the south-east extension.
To follow-up on the latest results, a 5000 metre aircore drilling program to broadly test the soil anomaly is currently planned to commence in July.
Anthony Baillieu, acting chairman, said “We are very pleased with these new soil results as they continue to confirm the company’s strong belief that the Longonjo Carbonatite has the potential to grow into a significant and highly competitive rare earth element project.
"Longonjo continues to represent an extraordinarily exciting early stage rare earth element project that the company is intending to advance as quickly as possible through aggressive drilling programs planned to commence in July."
Longonjo is located close to infrastructure including the regional city of Huambo and road networks, as well as the recently recommissioned railway to the port city of Benguela which passes less than 3 kilometres from the project.
In other Black Fire news, copper-gold-uranium-iron mineralisation and historical mine workings have been discovered at the Cassenha Hill Prospect, also located within the project.
Rock chips peaked at 9% copper and 6g/t gold.
The project area covers some 3,600 square kilometres of Archaean/Palaeoproterozoic greenstone rocks.
Comment
These encouraging results for Black Fire would seem to have very significant similarities to Peak Resources' (ASX: PKR) Ngualla Rare Earth Project in Tanzania. Black Fire's Longonjo project appears to offer investors a cheaper entry point yet with similar potential to Peak Resources, which is roughly 12 months in advance of Black Fire which is preparing to drill Longonjo aggressively in July.
