vanhoe Mines’ (TSX: IVN; OTCQX: IVPAF) Executive Co-Chair Robert Friedland and President Marna Cloete announce today that the company has been granted three new highly prospective exploration rights adjacent to the company’s Platreef palladium, rhodium, nickel, platinum, copper, and gold development project in Limpopo Province, South Africa.
Ivanhoe Mines has received notification from the South Africa Department of Minerals and Energy (DMRE) that it has obtained three new significant exploration rights, covering a total surface area of 80 square kilometres. Ivanhoe Mines owns 100% of the exploration rights.
The exploration rights overlap a significant geophysical gravity anomaly, known as the “Mokopane Feeder”, the centre of which is located approximately 10 kilometres from Platreef’s Shaft 1 (see Figure 1).
The new rights form a continuous block situated on the southwest border of the existing Platreef Projects’ mining rights, called Turfspruit and Macalacaskop that cover in total 78 square kilometres. The Platreef Project contains approximately 58.8 million ounces of precious metals (3PE+Au) as well as 6.2 billion pounds of copper and nickel in indicated resources, and 94.3 million ounces as well as 11.9 billion pounds of copper and nickel in inferred resources, at a cut-off grade of 1.0 g/t 3PE+Au.
Ivanhoe Mines’ Executive Co-Chairman, Robert Friedland commented:
“The Bushveld Complex sits among the most unique and valuable mineral endowments on our planet. These exploration rights are postulated to be geologically significant by our leading geoscientists. The new exploration rights are located at the intersection of a highly significant gravity geophysical anomaly and major regional geological structures. Therefore, the ‘Mokopane Feeder’ may be related to the actual source of the giant mineralizing system feeding the entire Northern Limb of the Bushveld Complex.
Our team has worked tirelessly to secure this important area, which could be of vital significance to the world’s future supply of nickel, copper and platinum-group metals. We see increasing prospects of supply disruption in these particular metals due to the potential international sanctions on Russia.
Ivanhoe Mines has been and always will be built upon world-scale discovery. We continue to actively assess opportunities to add exploration projects to our portfolio to leverage our industry leading geological team.”
