Our Senior Corporate Finance Associate, Casey Portors discusses Ark Mines' recently acquired Sandy Mitchell Project, with Ben Emery, the Executive Director of Ark Mines Ltd. 

Ark Mines is a junior mining exploration company that is focusing on developing assets in tier 1 jurisdictions, with a focus on critical minerals. The Company recently announced its acquisition of the Sandy Mitchell Rare Earths project in North Queensland. Ark Mines is currently on site, commencing its drilling project, with the project well underway.

Read the Conversation:

Hi everyone. I'm Casey. I'm a senior associate in the corporate finance team at Barclay Pierce Capital and I'm joined here today by Ben Emery, the executive director of Ark Mines.

Hi, Casey. How are you? Yeah, good. Thanks for joining us. Arc Mines is a junior mining exploration company that is focusing on developing assets in tier-one jurisdictions with a focus on critical minerals.

Um, with a specific focus on rare earths, nickel and copper at the moment. And the company recently announced that it's acquired the Sandy Mitchell rare earths project in North Queensland. So while the company does have three other projects, we will focus on Sandy Mitchell today. So Ben, could you give us some points on what attracted you and the Ark Board to Sandy Mitchell?

Yeah, look, the Sandy Mitchell project, we saw some historical data on 100 auger holes that were drilled across the deposit around 2010 and 11, giving very good  NDPR grades up to 25 percent and very good encouraging zircon, rutile and ilmenite grades in the project. And also what's attractive is it's a placer deposit, so it's a sand deposit allowing for um, low cost mining potentially and mining from surface.

So we don't have much cover. We're starting to pay dirt. Thanks, Ben. It really does look like what you're looking to do at Sandy Mitchell fits into Ark's overall exploration and development strategy. You previously stated that you're looking to develop projects that have near term production potential and ideally with simple processing methods and targeting low CapEx.

Would that be fair to say? That's our model. You got it in one Casey. Yeah. Look, we are looking at, um, fast tracking projects to production where, um, we both Roger and myself both have a strong mining focus and, and projects we've currently focusing on allow us, um, short term window to market. Correct. Yeah.

Great. Do you mind giving us an overview of the next steps at Sandy Mitchell in terms of the exploration strategy? Yeah, we're currently on site now with our GOs, um, doing a drilling program with Saxon Drilling, um, Air Corps. We were up there, I got back last night with Roger. The, the, look, it's encouraging so far.

The project's well underway. It's probably got another couple of weeks into the project. The results are very encouraging with regards to, um, we're doing a pan. concentrate from the each meter. And that gives us an indication of, um, that we are in sort of, um, a heavy material in the sand. And we're also running in parallel with a scintillometer, which gives us the radiation levels, which is, uh, generally the host of the rare earths.

Great. Thanks for that, Ben. Really excited to see how that all pans out. Um, pardon the pun.  Yeah. All right. Thanks for joining us today, Ben. Um, for anyone who'd like to learn more about Ark mines, feel free to click on the link or reach out to us.