Shares in Rimfire Pacific Mining NL (ASX:RIM) rose 24% after it said historic assay results for the Avondale platinum deposit suggest the area could be prospective for nickel and cobalt.
Drill work, which gets underway later this month or in April, will help build a picture of the area.
Avondale is 13km from the company’s Fifield Project in New South Wales and previous exploration work focused on whether the deposit was rich in platinum group metals.
Re-assaying done in 2004 of drill programs conducted during 2002 and 2003 confirmed the presence of cobalt with nickel. Separate multi-element assays delivered “significant” nickel results.
- The best cobalt intersection was 5 metres at 0.12% of the metal, which is used in batteries, along with 0.27% nickel.
- The best nickel intersection was 11 metres at a grade of 1.46% with traces of cobalt.
READ: Rimfire expands gold and copper signature
With the nickel price now in the vicinity of $18,000 per tonne, “the nickel potential will form a part of our investigations as we move this prospect forward”, said Rimfire chief executive John Kaminsky.
“We were able to examine unpublished cobalt assays, attribute these results to the exact holes and spatial locations successfully,” he added, walking investors through the process of screening the information.
“We were fortunate enough to also locate some of the original archived drill cuttings and laboratory pulps.
“These drill cuttings have been examined, and we have satisfied ourselves that the geology looks promising and capable to host cobalt mineralisation."
Drilling planned
CEO Kaminsky conceded the Rimfire team is dealing with “information gaps” in the data.
So, the plan is to validate the historic work with some newly-planned drill holes. There will also be “appropriate re-submissions of some of the historic pulps for re-assay for cobalt and nickel”. This should occur later this month or in April.
The shares rose $0.026 to $0.005, valuing the business at just shy of $23 million.
World-class mining zone
As mentioned above, Rimfire’s focus is on the Fifield district, in central NSW, which is within the Lachlan Transverse Zone (LTZ), one of the most important copper-gold corridors globally.
Foreign investors in the LTZ include China Molybdenum and Sumitomo, Glencore, Yunnan Tin and, most recently, New Gold (TSE:NGD).
Fifield itself is the only substantial area in Australia where platinum was mined.
However, gold and silver have been the focus for Rimfire as it has developed the Sorpresa discovery, which has a JORC resource of 125,000 ounces of the yellow metal along with 7.9 million ounces of silver.
Five advanced prospects
Within its property, it has five advanced regional prospects within a 6km radius of Sorpresa that are undergoing drilling and assessment and there are around 30 prospects in all.