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Andrew Todd
There are moments in an exploration company’s life that can define its future, where a persistent geological hunch pays off and a project suddenly shifts from being a line item in a portfolio to a potential company-maker. For Accelerate Resources, that moment appears to have arrived at its dual-commodity portfolio in Western Australia.
While the company has been consistently revealing shallow gold prospects in the world-class Eastern Goldfields, the sheer scale and grade of the manganese mineralisation it has uncovered at its Woodie Woodie North manganese project in the Pilbara hints at a large-scale system for Accelerate and elevated the junior into the class of both a critical minerals and precious metals player.
The Woodie Woodie North project is strategically located in one of Australia’s rarest manganese provinces. It sits just 55 kilometres north of Consolidated Minerals’ operating Woodie Woodie mine – mainland Australia’s only and longest-running producer of high-grade manganese ore.
Being on the doorstep of a major, multi-decade mining operation is an enviable position for any explorer but more importantly, the at-surface geology doesn’t respect tenement boundaries. The company says it now appears to be sitting on a significant extension of the same mineralised system that has made its neighbour a globally significant producer. This latest discovery by Accelerate now suggests there is plenty more where that came from.
‘We have now mapped more than 200 manganese outcrops and occurrences defining around 9.7 hectares of mineralised manganese exposure.’
Accelerate Resources chief executive officer Luke Meter
The company says its project covers a substantial 432-square-kilometres of highly prospective ground, incorporating seven mapped, large-scale manganese corridors that stretch over a combined 42km of strike. It’s a district-scale footprint and the early-stage work is definitely hinting at district-scale potential.
Recent detailed mapping and LiDAR surveys have identified more than 200 individual manganese outcrops across the project’s Gingarrigan-El Largo area, defining a combined mineralised footprint of almost 10 hectares at surface.
And the grades are nothing short of spectacular.
Rock chip sampling from the newly defined Rancor and Wampa prospects has returned grades as high as 58.4 per cent manganese, with a slew of other impressive hits including 57.6 per cent, 55.6 per cent – for context Australia’s two operating mines run a resource around 40 per cent manganese.
The outcropping grades look bang on for direct-shipping ore (DSO) grades. DSO is the holy grail for bulk commodity miners, as it means the ore is high-grade enough to be dug up and shipped directly to customers with minimal processing, dramatically slashing both capital and operating costs. And with the project nestled just 260km from Port Hedland and 55km north of Consolidated Minerals’ Woodie Woodie infrastructure, there is plenty of promise for a DSO scenario.
The company’s Rancor prospect alone is now defined by a one-hectare manganese outcrop with an apparent thickness of up to 10 metres. With heritage surveys now complete, the company is gearing up for a maiden reverse-circulation drilling program to test these exceptional surface targets at depth.
Accelerate Resources chief executive officer Luke Meter said: “The scale of the surface manganese at Gingarrigan and El Largo is becoming increasingly clear. We have now mapped more than 200 manganese outcrops and occurrences defining around 9.7 hectares of mineralised manganese exposure, with several of the larger bodies showing a close relationship to the structural architecture highlighted by the gravity survey.”
Accelerate says the project already boasts a 1.2 million tonne resource grading 19.1 per cent manganese, with an exploration target of between 5.3 and 10.7 million tonnes at 10 to 19 per cent in the books. Following the definition of 200 plus outcropping discoveries, the exploration target would look to be just tip of the iceberg at Gingarrigan and El Largo, with plenty more upside now on the table for the explorer.
While manganese remains a critical and irreplaceable ingredient in steelmaking, its future is also being supercharged by the electric vehicle revolution. It is a key component in nickel-manganese-cobalt batteries and is crucial to the emerging, lower-cost battery chemistries like lithium-manganese-iron-phosphate (LMFP), which are being rapidly being adopted by industry giants like CATL and BYD.
But while the manganese story has deservedly grabbed the spotlight, Accelerate has not taken its eye off its original precious prize. The company’s flagship Balagundi project continues to turn up high-grade gold discoveries in the prime real estate of WA’s Eastern Goldfields. Just 15km east of Kalgoorlie, the project sits in the heartland of Australian gold mining, putting Accelerate in the shadow of the headframes of the 70-million-ounce Super Pit and neighbouring the 6-million-ounce-plus Kanowna Belle mine.
The project’s proximity to a host of hungry, third-party processing mills means even a modest-sized discovery in today’s gold price environment can be highly economic, offering several low-capital pathways to potential production that has served countless goldfields juniors well in recent years.
Accelerate recently doubled its footprint at Balagundi insisting a broader gold system is emerging within its gold corridors, following a second shallow gold discovery at its Spencers prospect, where shallow drilling returned a thick 28-metre hit grading 1.01 grams per tonne gold from just 36m. The prospect lies within a granted mining lease at Balagundi and has already been defined over 300m of strike, providing a clear target for fast-tracked production ounces.
Spencers sits at just one of a raft of gold prospects along the company’s Paris Gift gold trend, which cuts through its prime Kalgoorlie tenure. Add in its Paris Gift, Mt Bellew, Fluffy and Delta prospects and the company has more than its fair share of long ignored, shallow gold prospects to keep it busy in the goldfields.
Accelerate’s classic Kalgoorlie gold play has a clear, low-cost path to potential production and now sits right alongside a potentially company-making, critical minerals project with jaw-dropping grades in an emerging manganese district.
For Accelerate, the exploration journey has led to two distinct destinations. One is paved with the golden promise of the Eastern Goldfields, the other with the industrial muscle of Pilbara manganese. With drilling set to begin on its high-grade manganese targets, the market may not have to wait long to see which path delivers first.
Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: mattbirney@bullsnbears.com.au
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