This article is a sponsored feature from Mining.com.au partner Terra Metals. It is not financial advice. Talk to a registered financial expert before making investment decisions.
In 2024 Terra Metals (ASX:TM1) made two large Bushveld-style reef discoveries extending for at least 20km of strike. They are large mineralised stratiform reefs hosted within the Jameson Layered Intrusion, part of the Giles Complex.
The discovery was named Dante and the 100% owned project sits within the same geological complex as one of the world’s largest mining development projects – BHP’s (ASX:BHP) $1.7 billion Nebo-Babel mine development in the West Musgrave Block, 125km west of the South Australia-Northern Territory-Western Australia junction.
Speaking to Mining.com.au, Terra Metals CEO Thomas Line says while the flagship asset shares similarities with deposits commonly found in the Bushveld Province in South Africa, Dante stands alone.
It is the only known resource with potential to host large sulphide deposits containing copper, gold, platinum group metals (PGMs), vanadium, and titanium – “all supreme grade in recovery”.
In the Bushveld Province, the vanadium and titanium layers are at the top of the stratigraphy, and the precious and base metal rich layers are deeper in the stratigraphy.
“But never before have we seen the vanadium and titanium layers together with the base and precious metals in the same layer,” Line says.
“That’s one of the things that makes Dante really unusual. It is the first of its kind in Australia. It’s the first of its kind in the world”
“That’s one of the things that makes Dante really unusual. It is the first of its kind in Australia. It’s the first of its kind in the world.”
Overseeing the metallurgical testwork is Evan Kirby, who Line calls the ‘world’s best metallurgist’ for this type of mineralisation. Kirby spent many years working for South African mining companies and knows the Bushveld Province intimately.
So it’s easy to see why in the year since the Dante discovery, Terra Metals is no longer flying under the radar. Its share price is surging. After trading at $0.020 in May the company at the time of writing has now hit the $0.180 mark and is rising.
Securing commitments from new and existing institutional investors last month to raise $15 million to advance Dante means the market can expect further updates for some time.
Bushveld-style reef discoveries
The most important recent update came on 11 August 2025 with Terra Metals unveiling the maiden mineral resource estimate (MRE) for the Dante Project.
Dante’s MRE comes in at 148 million tonnes @ 14.8% titanium (TiO₂), 0.54% vanadium (V₂O₅), 0.18% copper, 0.33 grams per tonne 3PGE (1.38% CuEq) containing 22Mt TiO₂, 800,000 tonnes V₂O₅ and 270,000 tonnes copper, as well as 1.6Moz 3PGE.
The 3PGE comprises 400,000 ounces of gold, 880,000oz platinum, and 330,000oz palladium – all from surface.
“What the mineral resource estimate shows is that we have a massive polymetallic resource,” the CEO tells this news service.
“What the mineral resource estimate shows is that we have a massive polymetallic resource”
“That’s just a very small part of the project. In terms of what’s to come … we know it’s only a small part of the strike.”
The MRE area covers less than 10% of mapped mineralised trend. Line believes there is at least 100km across the project. The mineral system remains open along strike and at depth, with reconnaissance expanding known footprint.
On 22 September, Terra Metals announced phase three drilling at Danted delivered immediate success with a 58m intercept of magnetite reef mineralisation at the new Southwest prospect, based on visual observations of the drill samples.
This represents the thickest reef interval encountered to date and confirms the company’s strategy of systematically targeting thicker and higher-grade portions of reef mineralisation.
Drilling also intersected ultramafic and sulphide-rich geology at the Southwest prospect, further strengthening the geological model and supporting the potential for associated copper, gold, PGMs, nickel, cobalt, vanadium, and titanium mineralisation.
In August 2024, Reef 1 South assay results confirmed an 11.2km extension of the Dante Reefs discovery strike, more than doubling the initial discovery strike. This further demonstrates Dante’s large-scale potential.
Metallurgical testwork is investigating whether Dante can produce three commercial concentrate products from representative samples of reef ore using simple low-cost processing techniques.
The testwork is already demonstrating “supreme” grade concentrate products. This includes 28% copper, 17g/t gold, 21.4g/t PGM sulphide concentrate, as well as high-grade titanium-ilmenite concentrate and a high-grade vanadium-magnetite concentrate through low-cost magnetic separation techniques.
Notably, recovery rates for copper (95.8%), titanium dioxide (65.6%), vanadium pentoxide (90.9%), PGMs (74.4%), and gold (75.8%) have been achieved. The titanium and vanadium recoveries are touted as the highest seen anywhere.
Dante’s peak
Titanium is the most valuable in the sulphide concentrate. However, copper equivalent is used to report copper-bearing polymetallic mineralisation that carry additional titanium dioxide (TiO2), vanadium pentoxide (V2O5), gold, platinum, and palladium. It is simply for peer comparisons.
“You can’t do an equivalent for titanium because it’s a mineral. The value of titanium is based on the mineral form it is in so it’s very hard to backcalculate it to that,” the CEO adds.
“And the purpose of the equivalent is to allow people to be able to understand the value and compare it. Copper has visibility on pricing, transparency on pricing. People understand it.
“Titanium minerals are very difficult to track, and vanadium prices are very difficult for most people to understand.”
Terra Metals believes all the elements included in the metal equivalents calculation have reasonable potential to be recovered and sold. As such, Dante is on track to become a competitive producer of multiple strategic mineral products from a single source.
“Often in these deposits, and we saw it with Chalice (Mining) and Julimar, and other ones around the world, the precious metals can have difficult properties with flotation, and they don’t always behave with the PGM-rich deposits,” the CEO explains.
“But for ours, we’re lucky that it performs very well in flotation.”
Defining Dante
The polymetallic nature of the deposit offers further upside for Terra Metals to leverage exposure to a wide range of important metals.
“This is a diversified critical and precious metals portfolio in a single resource. That’s what the strategic investors recognised when they saw the size, the scale, the metallurgy, and the different metals in there,” the CEO continues.
“That’s one of the reasons they’ve come in. It’s ironically the thing that has attracted the investment from these sophisticated, globally diversified mining companies,” the CEO adds.
“While the Australian retail market still doesn’t fully understand it because of the amount of metals, the beautiful thing is they can all be extracted and separated very cost-effectively.”
Terra Metals has now defined the first resource. But how does one define such a deposit? Is it titanium? Is it vanadium? Is it copper? Is it a platinum deposit?
“The true answer is it literally is all of those things,” Line says.
Looking ahead, more reef layers are expected to be uncovered. In terms of drilling, Terra Metals has barely scratched the surface.
Grades of the different metals are also expected to change. Some reefs may prove to contain higher precious metals concentrations, while others may be higher in copper. Some reefs might be uncovered where titanium or vanadium dominate.
Longer term, Terra Metals remains open-minded about how to develop Dante. This includes considering potential strategic partnerships, various offtake agreements, or other arrangements.
“We’re not locking out anything. We’re also not going to give away too much upside too early. We’ve had interest in offtake agreements already, even before we reported a resource, because the commodity traders in Asia immediately understand the value of the vanadium as one thing,” Line adds.
“There’s a bullish sentiment around vanadium in China right now with all the redox flow batteries being built. There aren’t big resources like ours that can make a vanadium concentrate like this coming online, anywhere in the world. This is the only one right now.
“It could be the biggest vanadium resource of this quality in the world as just a byproduct alongside the other metals”
“It could be the biggest vanadium resource of this quality in the world as just a byproduct alongside the other metals. We have had the approaches for offtakes, but we don’t want to give away the upside too early. There’s so much low hanging fruit for us.”
In the coming 12 months Terra Metals will seek to materially increase the resource. Further discoveries are possible as it seeks to multiply the contained metal in the MRE.
“There is no way we have drilled the best this project has to offer yet,” the CEO says, adding “the whole thing is full of these ribbons of material sticking out. Most of them have not even been mapped.”
Terra Metals has now exercised the option to acquire privately held HRM Exploration in order to expand landholdings at Dante as part of its strategy focused on metallic metals.
HRM’s tenement package includes four exploration licenses, spanning 618km2, that are contiguous with the flagship polymetallic project region. The acquisition strengthens its tenement position in the West Musgrave region and the Jameson Layered Intrusion.
Write to Adam Orlando at Mining.com.au
Images: Terra Metals & Mining.com.au
