Promising met results for WA base metals project

Our base metals junior Investment AuKing Mining (ASX:AKN) today announced encouraging results from metallurgical testwork for the Koongie Park base metals project (80% stake) in the Halls Creek mining hub, WA.

Koongie Park currently hosts a 8.9Mt resource, containing 1.01% copper, 3.67% zinc, 0.77% lead, 0.16g/t gold, and 26g/t silver. Translating that into total contained metal, we have:

• 90k tonnes copper;
• 326k tonnes zinc;
• 46koz gold;
• 9.1Moz silver; and
• 68k tonnes lead.

These are split between two deposits, namely Onedin (shallow oxides ore) and Sandiego (deep sulphides ore).

Note that the type of rock that hosts the base metals is important and can determine whether a deposit is viable economically. For a guide to the importance of ores for base metals exploration, take a look at our previous note on AKN here - What we are looking to see next.

The key issue for AKN is NOT to do with the size nor depth of its resources at Koongie Park, but the complex metallurgy at its shallow Onedin prospect.

You see, the resource at Onedin is hosted within oxide ores, which require a more complex process to extract the metals it hosts. AKN have been progressing metallurgical testwork to try and uncover a processing path to extract those commodities.

As announced today, metwork has uncovered excellent (i.e. better than 90%) recoveries of copper from certain Onedin ores, utilising ammonia leaching.

However, zinc recoveries were more of a mixed bag. Higher grade zinc zones have been shown to be amenable to ammonia leaching, but not so much with lower grade zinc zones.

These findings will now feed into the major metallurgical testwork program for Onedin, which will commence shortly. We anticipate that this should progress through to 1H2023.

Given how shallow the Onedin resource is, if AKN can find a solution here, this would be the most logical resource to fast-track to production at Koongie Park.

This relates to our second key objective we’d like to see AKN deliver this year, namely:

On the horizon, we expect that an updated JORC resource incorporating the Emull prospect is likely within the next month or so, alongside further drilling at that prospect (see Objective #3).