Transcription of The Stock Network Interview with Power Minerals (ASX:PNN), CEO Alistair Stephens
Lel Smits: Alistair Stephens is the CEO of Power Minerals, a critical minerals company focused on rare earths, lithium and niobium across South America. Ahead of appearing at Stoxx on location, Alistair joins me to discuss the rapid progress at the Morro do Ferro rare earth project in Brazil, including recent high-grade discoveries and its new priority project status with the government of Minas Gerais. Alistair, welcome to the Stock Network.
Alistair Stephens: Thank you very much.
Now, recent drilling has delivered further broad high-grade rare earth mineralisation. What are the results revealing about Morro do Ferro and also what are the key steps towards a maiden York mineral resource?
Alistair Stephens: Yeah, the results that we’ve drilled so far, we started drilling in late June.
So we’ve got about four or five holes now into the market with assays and some particularly high tenor grades of rare earths, intervals of 30, 40 and 50 metres going between five and 10%. There’s several many consistent intervals of 10% grade material at 20 or 30 or 40 metres. So we’re on a particularly high tenor, high value project.
The interesting thing about the total rare earth grade is if you look behind that into the magnetic rare earth content, we’re not talking about a ratio, we’re talking absolute values that are 1, 2, 3. I think 3.5% is our highest value of an average interval of NDPR TBDY. So this is a project with high tenor at surface with high-grade, high-value mineralisation. So it’s been a delight to actually release the results.
It’s always good to have good results into the market and these have been sensational. More importantly, there’s greater depth too. So the previous drilling identified drilling down to about 50, 60 metres.
We’ve extended that now down to about 100 metres in that high-grade zone. We now know there’s other grades of mineralisation between one and 5% below that. We’ve got an interval, which is our deepest interval at the moment of about 4 metres at 4%, 2 metres at 7%.
So we know that there’s now probably a feeder zone that we’re tapping into in the drilling. So this is adding into the whole prospectivity and the fact that this project is going to be a high-grade, high-tenor, high-value project. Morro do Ferro has also received priority project treatment from the Government of Minas Gerais.
Lel Smits: How could this support the project’s pathway through studies, permitting and also towards development?
Alistair Stephens: This is an important milestone for the organisation. It’s recognition that this is a statewide important project, a project important for Brazil and a globally significant discovery. The fact that we get priority status now means that the government will appoint a central agency to help coordinate all the other agencies that you are engaging with in terms of your approval processes.
One important aspect to remember here is that this particular project has an unusual mining title status. It’s called a Manifesto de Mina. It was allocated in 1946.
It’s a mining license that’s issued in perpetuity. So you are landowners as well as mineral right owners. So we don’t need to go through the approval processes for mine development.
This now status gives us appropriate coordination of all the other approvals, which is mostly the environmental approval processes. But there’s also other processes of our community engagement, local government. So this is a great recognition that this project has high priority status.
Lel Smits: Well, I really appreciate the update from Power Minerals today, Alistair, and look forward to seeing you at Stocks on Location very soon.
Alistair Stephens: Fantastic. Thank you very much.
Lel Smits: Thank you.
Ends