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Diamond & Specialty Minerals Summary for June 7, 2022
2022-06-07 20:02 ET - Market Summary
by Will Purcell
The diamond and specialty minerals stocks box score on Tuesday was a positive 95-91-124 as the TSX Venture Exchange added four points to 722. Another brief jaunt north of 30 cents has ended for Ken MacNeill and Ewan Mason's Star Diamond Corp. (DIAM). Its stock, 26 cents late last week, spurted to 32 cents yesterday before closing at 30 cents. Today, Star Diamond lost two cents to 28 cents on 274,000 shares. There is still no word what the company and its majority co-venturer have planned for the year that began at the end of May. With mineral exploration, silence snuffs out a rally like a candle in the wind.
Chuck Fipke and Chad Ulansky's Metalex Ventures Ltd. (MTX) was unchanged at six cents on 108,000 shares. The company has been exploring for diamonds, mainly in Ontario and Quebec, since its formation 20 years ago, but lately, its focus has been wandering toward other, more promotable minerals. Metalex's most recent activity has been in Quebec, but its talk shifted from diamonds to gold a few years ago.
Metalex is again cheering word of ilmenites, one of many diamond indicator minerals, but the talk about them now centres on their scandium content, not the possibility they might lead to gems. Mr. Fipke, the company's chairman, and Mr. Ulansky, his president and chief executive officer, say that they have identified a drill target on the A5 claim block, south of Chibougamau in north-central Quebec, based on geophysics and mineral sampling.
Mr. Fipke says that A5, which had been staked based on it covering an area deemed anomalous in scandium and gold, will be the focus of a drill program this spring and summer. He says that analysis of one sample from the area produced the highest scandium content of all the 8,700 individual samples the company has collected across central Quebec. Indeed, the "abundant ilmenite present" assayed as high as 400 parts per million scandium he cheers, compared with between 20 and 40 ppm that is more the norm with ilmenite.
Metalex's best sample came from an area where a stream enters a large north-to-south-trending lake in the centre of the claim block. Subsequent sampling showed "highly anomalous ilmenite counts" and "gold results" upstream from the original find. Also in the area immediately up-ice from the abundant ilmenite and strong gold, Mr. Fipke says, are geophysical anomalies that he and is crew now intend to drill.
Scandium has been much touted as an alloy ingredient that strengthens aluminum up to 15-fold, and so it is in demand by the aviation and space industries and the automotive sector. Most of the world's scandium currently comes from Russia and China -- oh joy -- but Rio Tinto is planning to recover scandium from ilmenite sitting in tailings at its Allard Lake project, near Havre St. Pierre in the North Shore area of Quebec, north of Anticosti Island.
Rio Tinto plans to extract the scandium from a new circuit at its refinery near Montreal, and once that equipment is operational, the company thinks it can supply about 20 per cent of the world's demand for scandium. That plan has tweaked the interest of Mr. Fipke, who will now go hunting ilmenite on what was once a diamond project.
Whatever the company was chasing on its sprawling Wemindji-James Bay property, Metalex spent most of its $1.56-million in exploration dollars over the past nine months on the project. The expenditure covered the 1,250 new heavy mineral samples from five distinct claim blocks, and the airborne geophysics. With the drilling now planned, it appears that Metalex will again be putting its primary effort on the Quebec property again this year.