Projects - Thackaringa Cobalt Project

The promising Thackaringa cobalt project lies 25 km southwest of the major Australian mining centre of Broken Hill, which hosts a world class silver/lead/zinc deposit.
The area has been drilled over the past 35 years by a number of companies, including Rio Tinto.
In the past three years Broken Hill Prospecting Limited (BHPL) has completed programmes of extensive geological mapping and sampling that identified sulphide gossan horizons in outcrop. These encouraging results were followed up by shallow rotary air blast (RAB) drilling to trace extensions of these horizons under thin soil cover.

The gossans are anomalous for a variety of base metals, including cobalt, copper, lead and zinc, as well as gold.

Little detailed exploration of this type has been carried out in the past in this area and the encouraging results indicate significant potential for additional cobalt resources and new areas of Broken Hill-style base metal mineralisation.

Further RAB and reverse circulation (RC) drilling is planned for 2010, leading to diamond drilling to test deeper targets.

A prospectus was registered in late 2010 by BHPL and the Initial Public Offer will close on 31 January 2011. Listing on the Australian and New Zealand stock exchanges is anticipated in mid-February 2011.

BHPL is targeting resource drilling in 2011 to increase its resource to 30M lb of cobalt in near surface deposits and continues to evaluate a number of treatment options for the ore.