Resources Top 5: Creasy-backed gold junior Peregrine is spreading its wings

• Punter favourite Peregrine Gold up 25% in early trade, and 55% year-to-date
• Conico/Greenstone Resources Mt Thirsty JV returns “outstanding” cobalt, nickel, and scandium drilling results — gain 100%, 21% respectively
• Tightly held, $6m capped minnow ENX is up on big volume

Here are the biggest small cap resources winners in early trade, Monday January 23.

 

PEREGRINE GOLD (ASX:PGD)

(Up on no news)

In August last year, Creasy-backed Peregrine Gold (ASX:PGD) flew out of the blocks on news of ‘spectacular’ gold mineralisation found in shallow drill core at its Peninsula prospect:

In December PGD announced more ultra-high-grade gold and silver from costeaning at the nearby Birdsnest prospect:

Peregrine was featured in the below column from @StockheadAU $PGD.ax hit 122,497g/t #gold & 26,234g/t #silver assays from sampling a quartz ironstone vein at the Birdsnest prospect during a costeans program.$PGD‘s #ASX ann https://t.co/1J9vwDGtukhttps://t.co/MdTxEtNNZf

— Peregrine Gold (@peregrinegold) December 20, 2022

Yep, you read right. 122,497g/t — which is equivalent to 120kg of gold for every tonne of dirt moved.

More high grade results came in January, with PGD’s third core hole at Peninsula returning an exceptional assay of 0.29m at 1,797g/t gold and 374g/t silver.

That one came with bonus rare earths.

We spoke to technical director George Merhi about PGD’s plans to find the motherlode in 2023. You can read our in-depth interview here.


 

CONICO (ASX:CNJ) and GREENSTONE RESOURCES (ASX:GSR)

The Conico/Greenstone Resources Mt Thirsty JV (50-50) in WA has returned “outstanding” new cobalt, nickel, and scandium drilling results, including 15m @ 0.45% Co, 0.91% Ni, 5.42% Mn and 40.9g/t Sc from 45m.

That’s the sixth best cobalt intercept in Australia for 2022, the JV says.

All up, the JV has hit three zones in drilling: an upper nickel-cobalt-manganese-scandium horizon, middle PGE horizon & lower nickel horizon.

The potential addition of scandium to the advanced Co-Ni Mt Thirsty project may provide a valuable by-product revenue stream, CNJ says.

Scandium oxide — essential for hydrogen fuel cells — currently sells for US$930,930/t.

It has been a rollercoaster 12 months for the Mt Thirsty JV, which is just 200m from Galileo Mining’s (ASX:GAL) Callisto palladium discovery announced May last year.

Initial drilling hoping to find extensions to the Callisto mineralisation at Mt Thirsty were disappointing, but today’s results represent a return to form for the JV.

“While the Joint Venture has yet to intersect high-grade PGE mineralisation similar to the neighbouring Callisto deposit, we remain encouraged by these results,” CNJ exec director Guy le Page says.

“Three discrete zones of horizontal mineralisation have now been defined with the confirmation of a lower, and potentially higher-grade Ni-Co-Mn-Sc zone outside of the existing resource serving to potentially complement a number of the other optimisation opportunities currently under consideration for the existing Mt Thirsty resource and PFS, including the use of high pressure acid leaching, the addition of a cathode precursor plant and the recovery of other elements like manganese and scandium.”

Assays are still pending on 17, 4 and 5 holes for the upper, middle, and lower zones, respectively.

Lithium drilling over the project area was unsuccessful, but a more detailed geochemical review of these results is ongoing “given the known regional prospectivity for high fractionated and mineralised pegmatites”.

 

ENEGEX (ASX:ENX)

(Up on no news)

Tightly held, $6m capped minnow ENX is up on big volume this morning.

In December, word on the street was that billionaire Andrew Forrest was looking to buy a big stake in neighbouring WA nickel developer Chalice (ASX:CHN), which could throw a renewed investor spotlight on the region.

ENX briefly soared in 2021 when it picked up eight exploration tenements near Chalice’s world-class Julimar discovery.

The junior now holds ~ 3576sqkm of ground in the South West Terrane, rubbing shoulders with larger capped explorers like Devex (ASX:DEV), Liontown (ASX:LTR), and Caravel (ASX:CVV).

ENX’s near term objective is to define quality drill targets for drill testing “as soon as feasible”.

It had $376,000 in the bank at the end of September.


 

IMPACT MINERALS (ASX:IPT)

BHP (ASX:BHP), a major supplier in both nickel and copper, has spread its wings by tipping cash into junior explorers.

It’s doing so via its venture capital accelerator BHP Xplor, which is paying US$500,000 cash into seven junior explorers hunting for copper, nickel and other critical minerals.

Among the seven successful companies is IPT, which has bounced on high volumes since announcing the inclusion of its Broken Hill project in the program last week.

IPT believes that there is significant untapped copper potential at Broken Hill and has been working with world renowned geologist Prof Tony Crawford on a new exploration ‘model’.

This is a different exploration model to that being pursued by IPT’s major joint venture partner IGO (ASX:IGO) on tenements  EL7390 and EL8234 “which are excluded from the program and comprise a very small portion of Impact’s tenements in the area”.

While BHP doesn’t acquire an equity interest in IPT or any project, the $500,000 does come with a set of conditions – namely, the major miner has first dibs on any JV arrangement if a discovery is made.

The post Resources Top 5: Creasy-backed gold junior Peregrine is spreading its wings appeared first on Stockhead.

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