Apollo Minerals happy with Mt Oscar drilling

THE DRILL SERGEANT: Iron ore exploration company Apollo Minerals has received results from metallurgical test work of an initial drilling program at Unit A on its Mt Oscar Main iron ore project.

The company’s executive general manager Dominic Tisdell said the results from the initial drilling and metallurgical test work was highly encouraging.

“These results clearly indicate Mt Oscar has the potential to produce desirable iron ore concentrates suitable for the steel making process,” Tisdell said in the company’s ASX announcement.

“We are highly encouraged by these advances and look forward to pushing the development of Mt Oscar forward as quickly as possible.”

Apollo has a 100% interest in the exploration rights of tenements covering an area of 273 square kilometres and located within the West Pilbara region approximately 35 kilometres from the coast.

A significant portion of the recently identified global Mount Oscar Main iron ore project lies within one of the company’s tenements.

Mt Oscar Main is the eastern extension of the Mt Oscar magnetite ‐ haematite iron ore resource. Unit A is the southern‐most iron formation identified to date.

Apollo currently has an exploration target of 350 to 650 million tonnes of magnetite at 30 per cent to 37 per cent iron over these properties.

Apollo said the recent drilling identified two distinctly different iron ore units.
The first is a predominantly magnetite bearing banded iron formation (“BIF”), while the other being suggestive of predominately oxidised or non‐magnetic BIF, including haematite and goethite.

Several large Davis Tube Recovery composites demonstrated very low levels of weight recovery including a cumulative interval of 89m at 37.3% iron of very weakly magnetic to non‐magnetic iron ore (equivalent to 30% of all mineralisation above a 20% Fe head grade cut‐off) including:

– 25m, from 171m, at 35.7% iron;

– 40m, from 121m, at 33.9% iron; and

– 25m, from 66m, at 27.6% iron.

Apollo said that collectively the results from all the recent work it has undertaken indicate that approximately 50% of the mineralisation below the base of oxidation may be weakly magnetic or non‐magnetic.

“Significant quantities of this mineralisation could be recoverable with further metallurgical test work,” the company said.

“These significant volumes of largely continuous, weakly to non‐magnetic iron ore are indicative of an itabirite-style ore similar to that produced in Brazil and that are planned to be processed in the Mid-West of Western Australia.

“The BIF is open in all directions and has similar characteristics to those identified during surface mapping.”