Rimfire Pacific Mining will divest its Cowal copper-gold project in New South Wales to hone in on scandium, a critical mineral known for being used in alloys for aerospace industries, specialised lighting applications, and electronics.
Rimfire will sell Cowal to Copper Search, a junior mineral explorer, for a total consideration of $700,000 via an option to purchase agreement.
Rimfire’s Cowal is situated 25km east of Evolution Mining’s Cowal gold mine in the southern Macquarie Arc of the Lachlan Fold Belt, a leading porphyry copper-gold province in Australia.
Copper Search will be granted an exclusive six-month option period to conduct due diligence to determine whether it will purchase Cowal.
If the deal proceeds, Cowal – which spans 455km2 – will join Copper Search’s Theseus copper-gold project, which currently consists of its 489km2 exploration licence application (ELA). By combining Copper Search’s ELA 6903 with Cowal, Theseus will total 944km2..
“I’m pleased to share with investors the next step in expanding our pipeline of drill targets across the Lachlan Fold Belt in New South Wales – the addition of the Theseus gold and copper project,” Copper Search managing director Duncan Chessell said.
“Copper Search has been actively assessing opportunities in the district because it meets several of our key selection criteria: a strong mining jurisdiction, proximity to operating mines, and demonstrated economic scale potential.
“Our next step is to combine the large amount of historical data and leverage our strong technical team, as well as our proprietary machine learning techniques, to identify targets for final verification.”
Rimfire managing director David Hutton said the agreement with Copper Search will allow the company to “focus on building a critical mass of scandium within the Fifield District – Australia’s scandium epicentre as efficiently and quickly as possible”.
“The Fifield scandium district, in which Rimfire has one of the largest scandium prospective landholdings has real potential to be a long term, low risk, secure supplier of this high valuable metal for the western world,” Hutton said.
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