Surefire Resources NL (ASX:SRN) has received encouraging vanadium results from a petrographic study at the Victory Bore Project in the Mid-West mining district in Western Australia.
The detailed petrographic study was undertaken on samples collected from within the main and central lodes in the vanadium mineralised resource structures at Victory Bore.
Notably, the main and central lodes have significant true widths of continuous and homogeneous vanadium grades:
Main Lode: up to 59 metres in true width, to a grade of up to 0.48% vanadium; and
Central Lode: up to 55 metres in true width, to a grade of up to 0.42% vanadium.
The study shows the Victory Bore magnetite deposit is able to provide a clean vanadium concentrate with low titanium and deleterious elements.
Furthermore, Surefire continues to evaluate the resource for the emerging vanadium storage battery market.
World-class resource
Surefire Resources new managing director Paul Burton said: “These results continue to build the Victory Bore project into a world-class resource which will be ideally suited for the emerging Vanadium Redox Battery sector.
“I am very pleased to have joined Surefire at this potentially transformational stage of the company and its projects.”
Study highlights
During the study, the scanning electron microscope (SEM) revealed spot-grade vanadium within the magnetite ranging from 1.8% to 3.9% vanadium.
The presence of ilmenite and magnetite identified with the majority of ilmenite occurring as coarse exsolution lamellae, indicating this will be easy to separate from the magnetite.
Therefore, the study concluded that with the coarse ilmenite, there was good metallurgical separation of ilmenite from magnetite and the SEM confirmed that most of the vanadium occurs within the magnetite.
As a result, the Victory Bore magnetite hosts relatively clean intrinsic vanadium, which should enable a simpler and cleaner separation in processing.
Surefire recently revealed a significant upgrade to the Victory Bore resource (with an increase of 56% to bring the Victory Bore/Unaly Hill combined total to 321 million tonnes at 0.40% vanadium making it one of the largest undeveloped vanadium resources in Australia with significant continuity of mineralisation.
Forward plan
Surefire is reviewing proposals for pre-feasibility studies (PFS) for Victory Bore.
In parallel, the company plans to undertake further analysis of the magnetite, along and across the Main and Central lodes, to establish the intrinsic grade and suitability of the material for Vanadium Redox Flow batteries.
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