Transcription of The Stock Network Interview with Metals Australia (ASX:MLS), CEO Paul Ferguson
Lel Smits: Metals Australia is progressing a diverse portfolio of critical and strategic mineral projects across Australia and Canada, with new exploration and development opportunities emerging alongside its flagship Lackahill Graphite project. I’m joined today by CEO Paul Ferguson to discuss the company’s expanding exploration pipeline, the emerging Menindee Vanadium Titanium Magnetite Opportunity and the key milestones ahead across its portfolio.
Paul, welcome back to the Stock Network.
Paul Ferguson: Thanks, Lel. Nice to be back talking to you again. Lovely to have you on.
And look, with Corvette River, Menindee Zinc and Warago East all providing potential catalysts, where do you see the most immediate exploration upside, outside Lackahill?
Paul Ferguson: Well, that’s right. I mean, that’s the key point, I think, with Metals Australia is we’re more than just a graphite project. And I think that’s a key point of distinction with a lot of our graphite peers really focused exclusively on their graphite project.
But in our case, we have some really good projects inside of our portfolio and probably start with the Corvette River project in Quebec, which is really a series of quite significant projects in its own right. I mean, any one of these, and I’ll call them sort of four particular project areas, East Pontois or Pontois projects, the Felici projects, and Western East Ede extend over fairly extensive areas. The Western East Ede blocks are greater than 10km east-west in their own right.
And these are very prospective for Gold. There’s been a number of field exploration projects on the Gold at Corvette, and we followed up in 2024 with some good results. And so the 3 highlights there are, the West Ede has got a good Gold corridor now built up over 1000m.
East Ede Gold corridor over about 450m. And about the same for Felici, only there’s some base metals present at Felici as well. So the one we want to get back to and have a look at is Pontois.
So these are very prospective. We just had the permits updated. Now they’re extended out through May of 2028.
So that’ll give us time to get back on the ground. And the next step of work there is to go and do some more exploration, identify the targets, and clearly with the Gold price the way it is, that’s a real potential for us. And then back in Australia, the 2 projects that I think sort of warrant a mention, Menindee on the Zinc project at Menindee, which a lot of people perhaps don’t know about inside of Metals Australia, and then the Warrago East project, which most of our investors will understand was a project we drilled last year.
But the Menindee Zinc project is a Zinc resource. It’s actually 4 separate zones of resource. The really nice thing about these is they’re amenable to open cut, so it’s quite shallow mineralisation.
We’ve got now just on 1.1Mt of mineralisation mapped out, or I should say in a resource estimate there, that contains over 70,000t of Zinc. And I’ll just remind everybody that the Zinc price now is over $3,800 a tonne, which aside from a quick jump up in 2022, it really hasn’t been at these kinds of prices for about 10 years. So that’s nice.
And of course it has Copper with it and we all know that Copper price is over $14,000 a tonne. So I think just to kind of recap for our investors, we’ve got 1.1Mt there, 70,000t of Zinc, fairly shallow Zinc and Copper prices both rising. And importantly, it’s on granted mining leases and only about 2km from our VTM project, our Vanadium Titanium Magnetite project at Menindee as well.
So that’s a nice one. And then finally over to Warrego, the last one I wanted to mention. Warrego, we’ve got a granted exploration tenement just to the east of what was the old Warrego mine that produced nearly 5Mt at around 2% Copper and around 8g a tonne Gold back through the late 80s.
And it’s just north of what was the White Devil Gold mine, which was part of Emerson Resources recently transacted. So we’re kind of surrounded by Copper, Gold or Gold deposits and there’s further of those to the east. And just to recap there, it’s not just the exploration tenement that we’ve got at Warrego east, but there are 3 other tenements in the portfolio of the Northern Territory that are actually progressing through various discussion phases at the moment on their way to being granted for us.
So they open up a very significant additional corridor of potential exploration opportunities for us. But back to the exploration lease that we do have, we drilled 5 targets. We got some really good indications in 2 of those targets that we need to follow up with some potentially deeper drilling.
And based on the evidence and the observations that we found in our exploration program in 2025, we’ve also identified 3 more targets. So there’s a lot going on between Corvette, the Menindee Zinc project, given its proximity to the VTM project and then up in the Northern Territory, not only in terms of the tenement that we do have, but also those other 3 that are actually going through the approval stage at the moment. Excellent.
Lel Smits: And look, Paul, looking closer at Menindee, it has identified high-grade vanadium titanium magnetite mineralisation. That’s across around 1,200 metres. Also produced 2 commercial-grade products through metallurgical testing.
What do you need to establish next to understand the scale and the potential commercial opportunity here?
Paul Ferguson: Yes. Well, a number of things we have said to our investors when we followed up with a drilling program in the late part of 2025, it was very successful. That’s what mapped out that 1,200 metres of mineralisation.
We anticipated we would see I think 14 or 15 holes straight into mineralisation. It’s not just 1,200 metres, it’s 75 to 95 metres in thickness. It’s shallow in places, only 17 metres or so below the surface, ranging out to about 50 metres.
So all of those geometric parameters mean that this is potentially an exceptional open-cut mineable target as well. So the next thing there in terms of the drilling that we did conduct in late 2025 is to convert that into a mineral resource and also an exploration target. We reminded everybody that it’s not just the discovery, there’s also targets 2, 3, 4 and 5, some lookalike targets right beside it.
Now those products that we produced are really exceptional products. I think we took the mass of the ore, we effectively converted 65% of the mass of the sample, if you will, into 2 commercial products. One, a very high-grade iron product with a Vanadium credit, so over 66% iron with little by way of impurities.
So for the steel mills particularly, that would be a very attractive feedstock. Then the titanium dioxide product that we produced out of the Ilmenite ore, we’re doing some further work on that at the moment to prove up the production of a high-purity product. So I’m talking into the high 90% titanium oxide.
Of course, titanium is another critical mineral along with the Vanadium, so that’s really emerging. So I think things we’ll see is the work on the mineral resource and the exploration target, the work on the production of that high-purity product for titanium, and that’ll give us both samples then that we can test with customers for interest. We think they’re going to be very attractive.
Then from there, it will be a case of moving that project into screening stages for further study.
Lel Smits: Excellent. And Paul, look, as multiple projects now are progressing through exploration resource definition and also that metallurgical work, how are you assessing which opportunities have the potential to become the next major value driver for Metals Australia?
Paul Ferguson: That’s right, yes.
So I think our investors and interested parties may note that we did put out a project pipeline summary in our most recent investor presentation at the end of July. So for people that haven’t seen that, do look that up. It was published on the ASX.
And that really mapped out the 3 phases we’re taking our projects through, that opportunity explore phase, the discovery resource evaluation stage, and then to get those into screening and study and development phases. So clearly on the right-hand side of that pipeline sits the development stage, and we’ve got a world-class graphite project. I just remind everyone of Edlac-Carr Hill, where we’ve already mapped out $2.56Bn of net present value on an after-tax basis, which would be the equivalent of $3.48 NPV per share on issue for us.
So that’s far from capped, a lot of upside potential in that project. The one that’s sitting behind that, of course, is Menindee. And while Menindee VTM or the Vanadium Titanium Magnetite project has garnered a lot of attention, we see this as a dual or a combination of projects, being the VTM, which I said we’re planning to move into the resource exploration target generation stage, so that work is underway, and also the work on the high-purity metals.
But in combination with that Zinc Copper Silver resource that’s shallow, open-cut in a very high Zinc and Copper price environment sits behind that. And of course, the ones just back from that in the project portfolio are the Corvette projects, which I said could be 4 projects in their own right, all very interesting for Gold. In fact, Gold corridors identified.
And then in this Copper environment, the Warrego East project as well, where we’ve seen early indications of Copper mineralisation as well in targets 1 and 2 that we drilled last year. So that’s quite a lot in that pipeline, all the way through everything from exploration to maturing target generation, discovery conversions into resources, and then those study stages, PEA, preliminary economic assessments, pre-feasibility studies, and then finally, as we’re working on with Lake Kahia, we’re into the feasibility study stage.
Lel Smits: Paul, thank you for the update from Metals Australia.
Ends