JOHANNESBURG (miningweekly.com) – Exploration and development company Stellar Resources has added to its portfolio of Tasmanian tin properties with the recent grant of an exploration licence at the Mount Razorback prospect.
The licence is located 10 km to the east of Stellar’s Zeehan mineral resource, and has an unsealed road network within that allows easy access to historical mines and the main exploration targets.
The company noted on Wednesday that any economic tin mineralisation discovered within the licence could be easily transported to a proposed processing facility at Zeehan or any other processing facilities in the area.
The exploration licence contains the historical Razorback and Grand Prize tin mines and a tailings dam. Between 1975 and 1978, the Razorback mine produced 153 t of tin in concentrate valued at $3.8-million at today’s Australian dollar tin price.
Stellar said that the property had a number of attributes that made it an attractive bolt-on for its Heemskirk tin project.
“Adding the Mount Razorback exploration licence is a great way to start the new year. This is the third significant tin asset in a portfolio that already includes Joint Ore Reserves Committee (Jorc) resources at St Dizier and Heemskirk.
“The synergy Mount Razorback offers Heemskirk tin and the advanced nature of its tin prospects make it a compelling addition,” said MD Peter Blight.
Stellar plans to focus on the Razorback mine and associated targets with three opportunities identified to date, including the economic recovery of tin from tailings, sampling and metallurgical testing of tailings establishing whether modern processing technology can improve on historical recovery to produce a saleable product and initial sampling and tailings characterisation to be completed in the March quarter.
Further, the company aims to identify a resource below the openpit. “Diamond drilling by previous title holders both before and after Minops mining activity has shown that a resource exists below and down-plunge of the openpit.”
During the March quarter, Stellar plans to create a three-dimensional model of historical drilling to establish a Jorc 2012 compliant mineral resource and to identify drilling targets.
In addition, the availability of an openpit will allow sampling across the pit floor to establish the distribution of mineralisation and access for the extract ion of a bulk sample for metallurgical testing.
Any improvement in recovery from the tailings testwork should also have positive implications for the resource.