Steenkampskraal Monazite Mine (Steenkampskraal) holds the Mining Right for the Steenkampskraal rare earth mine in the Western Cape province of South Africa.
Steenkampskraal has announce that the Department of Mineral Resources (DMR) has renewed its existing Prospecting Right around the Steenkampskraal mine.
The renewal of this PR was formally executed at the DMR office in Cape Town on 15 October 2019. The DMR granted this renewal for a period of three years until 11 July 2022. This PR covers five properties with a total surface area of 9751.7 hectares where Steenkampskraal had already identified high-grade rare earth occurrences.
Steenkampskraal had a Prospecting Right for five years from 2012 to 2017 on fifteen contiguous farms that covered a total of 55,051 hectares around the Steenkampskraal Mining Right area. During that time, Steenkampskraal conducted a prospecting programme for rare earths that included the following work and that produced the following results:
An extensive airborne geophysical survey (airborne magnetic and radiometric survey) over the entire Prospecting Right area which included 6,300 line-kilometres and defined 47 rare earth exploration targets.
Field investigation (ground-truthing) of the rare earth anomalies identified by the airborne geophysical survey. During this anomaly ground-truthing, non-invasive samples for assay were collected from selected areas of interest and included four samples that returned TREO+Y2O3 values greater than 1%, including a sample from the farm Tafelberg that returned a value of 24.68% TREO+Y2O3.
Channel sampling on the farms Uilklip and Roode Wal. A total of 11 channels were cut from the monazite occurrences from which 126 samples were collected and sent to SGS South Africa for high-grade REE assay using sodium peroxide fusion with ICP- MS finish. The table below presents a summary of the results of this sampling programme. One sample returned a TREO+Y2O3 value of 55.02%.
During the five-year period of the initial PR, Steenkampskraal identified several rare earth occurrences on five properties that cover a total area of 9751.7 hectares and applied for the renewal of the PR on these five properties. These five properties are: Portion 2 and Portion 3 of the farm Uilklip Number 65, Portion 1 of the farm Roode Wal Number 74, Portion 1 of the farm Rietkloof Number 459 and the Remainder of Portion 5 of the farm Tafelberg Number 64.
Trevor Blench, the Chairman of Steenkampskraal, commented: "We are delighted to receive this renewal of our Prospecting Right. We have already identified some exceptionally high rare earth grades in this area. We are now able to continue our prospecting activities with the objective of establishing a rare earth resource of sufficient magnitude to justify the conversion of the Prospecting Right to a Mining Right at the end of the three-year prospecting period.”