This article is a sponsored feature from Mining.com.au partner Tempest Minerals Limited. It is not financial advice. Talk to a registered financial expert before making investment decisions.
For junior explorer Tempest Minerals (ASX:TEM), it’s less about a specific commodity and more about making a discovery that will generate value.
Managing Director Don Smith says the common belief that commodities exist in isolation is something he has been trying to dispel for the general public for a long time.
“We have never been commodity focused. We’re focused on generating value. When you’re doing exploration, you want to find places that have great geology and the opportunity to find stuff,” he tells Mining.com.au.
This follows Tempest’s discovery of “high-grade” iron ore at its Remorse prospect in Western Australia, where the target was copper and zinc mineralisation.
Results from the first reverse circulation hole drilled in a 5,000m program returned 32m grading up to 39.34% magnetite-hosted iron.
Although extensive iron-rich stratigraphy was noted in all work undertaken prior to this drilling, due to the surface expression, it was viewed as a gangue mineral associated with base metal deposit styles such as volcanogenic massive sulphides (VMS).
Gangue is a worthless or unwanted material present in an ore.
“It looks pretty rubbish at the surface so it wasn’t our primary target economically,” Smith explains.
However, drilling proved this was not actually the case and Tempest decided to take a closer look at the iron potential within the Remorse target.
“Remorse looks like it’s shaping up to be a serious iron project so there will be an amount of focus on it for sure,” Smith notes.
“We now have a deposit which intrinsically has value so we’re not just ‘looking for something’ anymore.”
A richly endowed region
Remorse is one of several prospects that sit within Tempest’s flagship Yalgoo Project.
Mineralisation in the area consists of VMS, skarn, orogenic shear or vein gold, and intrusive related gold.
Smith says Yalgoo is a good example dispelling the myth that commodities exist in isolation.
“It is one of the most endowed provinces in Australia and has many commodities,” he says.
“The Yalgoo Belt has numerous gold mines, one of the longest running and certainly highest grade copper (+zinc/lead/silver/gold) mines in Australia as well as numerous legacy copper occurrences and one of the largest tungsten deposits in Australia.
“It is also one of the largest iron ore districts in Australia. Karara and Sino account for over 6 billion tonnes alone. But there are about a dozen serious iron mines or major development projects in the region.”
Smith says any substantial discovery is going to increase value for Tempest.
“Certainly, the iron ore discovery at Remorse is non-trivial,” he says. “We released an exploration target that shows that we believe there’s between 50 and 100 million tonnes of magnetite there.
“That’s pretty good. If it proves up, that’s well on its way to being a resource and a mine.”
Although Yalgoo is one of the most fertile regions in Australia, if not the world, according to Smith, it does not have the same high profile as other exploration hotspots.
This could be due to the fact that a lot of the operations in the area were discovered many years ago, or perhaps it is because the prospectivity of the region has been overlooked.
Tempest realised the potential of the particular patch of the Yalgoo region it is now exploring after crossing paths with some local prospectors that had dug a pit and uncovered a “giant amount of visible gold”.
“We recognised there was more prospectivity in this region than had previously been identified,” Smith explains.
“When I looked at the bigger picture using our innovative data techniques, we realised that there’s been some interpretation problems in the previous maps, particularly the government maps, and that meant that the important parts of the geology had been essentially missed.
“So we found an entire new section of the Yalgoo Belt that had never been explored before.”
‘Not a small project’
The Yalgoo Belt extends for about 100km and hosts at least seven major mining operations, including 29Metals’ (ASX:29M) Golden Grove mine – the highest grade, longest running copper mine in Australia.
Smith says Tempest is looking for the next Golden Grove, with the company having previously identified large-scale copper-zinc geochemical and geophysical anomalies.
“The geoscience we have done there applies to multiple other places and is a great summary of why we continue to think the project has strong fundamentals,” he says.
“Remorse is only one of dozens of targets we have and the prospectivity of the Yalgoo Project for copper is still strong.
“We’ve got a thousand square kilometres of this stuff and we’ve had to do it all from scratch.
“It’s pure greenfields exploration and that means that the opportunity is we’ve got a huge section that no one’s looked at before, but there’s a lot of work to do there. So it’s a multi-year project and we’ve been at it for a while now.”
From smoke to fire at Remorse
Smith says prior to the drilling undertaken late in 2024, Tempest had not uncovered anything economic.
However, that changed with the new iron discovery at Remorse.
“This is not our first discovery, we’ve actually discovered mineralisation in every drill program we’ve done, but unfortunately none of those were economic before,” Smith notes.
“So we were hitting a lot of smoke, but we never found the fire. But Remorse, this is fire.”
With this iron discovery, Tempest is “recalibrating” its Remorse exploration plan, but top of the agenda for early 2025 will be a fresh round of drilling.
Prior to the Christmas break, the Tempest team were on site collecting additional samples to undertake metallurgical testing.
The company is also seeking approvals for environmental studies, as well as economics and Infrastructure studies throughout 2025.
“Now we’re doing a dual strategy of developing the Remorse target into a deposit and ultimately into an operation, and we’re also doing our bonafide exploration,” Smith tells this news service.
“We’ve got a pipeline of targets to drill test.”
Tempest Minerals will be exhibiting at this year’s Prospectors & Developers Association of Canada (PDAC) event being held from 2-5 March in Toronto, Canada.
The annual award winning convention brings together up to 30,000 attendees from over 130 countries for its educational programming, networking events, as well as business and investment opportunities.
Mining.com.au is an official media partner for the upcoming event.
To register for PDAC 2025 click here.
Write to Angela East at Mining.com.au
Images: Tempest Minerals
