Barkly scores NT cash for rare earths met work

Newly-listed Barkly Rare Earths has pocketed a $100,000 grant from the Northern Territory Government, as it jostles to get a metallurgy at its namesake rare earths project, about 350km northeast of Tennant Creek.

The funding, awarded under the government’s Geophysics and Drilling Collaborations Programme (GDCP), will be matched dollar-for-dollar by the company to advance a campaign of mineral characterisation and processing testwork.

The program is designed to de-risk the project’s all-important metallurgical flowsheet ahead of a significant 10,000-metre resource expansion campaign, slated to kick off in the coming weeks.

In the world of rare earths, it’s not necessarily the adage that “grade is king,” rather that metallurgy is the final decider.

Barkly is wasting no time getting on top of its chemistry kit, quickly building on its historic small-scale testing, which produced some impressive early results, including a 74 per cent extraction of high-value magnet rare earth elements (MREE).

The company only hit the boards in January after a comfortably oversubscribed $8 million IPO at 20c per share, with an already substantial asset that sits ready for expansion.

Its flagship Barkly project already hosts a shallow inferred resource of 40 million tonnes grading 2100 parts per million (ppm) total rare earth oxides (TREO). Notably, the high-value magnet rare earths – neodymium, praseodymium, dysprosium and terbium – make up a hefty 34 per cent of the total resource – a respectable percentage in anyone’s books.

The magnet rare earth grade clocks in at an impressive 710ppm, a figure the company says matches or exceeds the total TREO grades of several other Australian projects that have already advanced to feasibility studies.

The mineralisation at Barkly is held in a sedimentary-hosted system of loose sands, a style that is uncommon in Australia but offers distinct advantages.

The deposit shows strong consistency over wide areas and, being essentially mobile cover, requires minimal crushing and screening – pointing to a potentially low-cost mining and processing operation.

The company says its deposit also sits at the low end of its peers for undesirable uranium and thorium waste elements.

Adding another string to its bow, a 200-million-tonne vanadium resource grading 0.12 per cent vanadium oxide overlies the rare earths zone, offering a handy by-product option should Barkly choose to pursue.

With the drills set to spin in June, management will be looking to test the scale of a massive exploration target at Barkly, which sits between a whopping 200M and 1B tonnes of resource grading 1600 to 1900ppm TREO.

With cash in the bank, a solid starter resource, a monster exploration target and a highly credentialed ex-Arafura Rare Earths ($1.4 billion market cap) management team, Barkly is making its run early.

The NT Government’s grant might only be a small piece of the funding puzzle, but it is a solid vote of confidence in the project’s potential. Now, with the met work ticking along, all eyes move to the drill bit to see if Barkly can deliver the kind of scale its geology is hinting at.

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