LONDON (Alliance News) - Bushveld Minerals Ltd saw its shares rise on Wednesday after it said the mineral resource at the Bushveld Vandium project in South Africa has more than doubled following the evaluation of the hanging wall units and additional layers.
Bushveld shares were up 10% to 3.30 pence per share Wednesday mid-morning.
On October 14, Bushveld said it had conducted metallurgical test work on samples from the hanging wall units to the main magnetite layer to assess the grade, and has now updated its resource as a result.
The two sides of a non-vertical fault are known as the hanging wall and footwall. By definition, the hanging wall occurs above the fault plane and the footwall occurs below the fault.
The updated mineral resource estimate now stands at 284.8 million tonnes, containing 1.9 million tonnes of vanadium oxide based on a 0.3% vanadium oxide cut off for the newly evaluated main magnenite layer and MML hanging wall.
The resource has more than doubled the tonnage of the project compared to the previous resource estimate of 120.5 million tonnes at a 25% iron cut off reported in September.
The updated resource estimate was defined using a vanadium based cut off grade rather than the iron cut off grade used in the previous estimate following the results of Davis Tube test work, which was used to determine magnetic content in iron ore samples, it said in a statement.
"This mineral resource update concludes the process of evaluating the potential of the various titano-magnetite-bearing layers known as the MML and MML hanging wall at our vanadium project," said Chief Executive Fortune Mojapelo.
Following the update, the MML indicated resource now stands at 63.2 million tonnes with a grade of 1.32% vanadium oxide.
"This additional mineral resource mainly comes from hanging wall layers that would otherwise have constituted waste during the mining of the MML, yet contain titano-magnetite," said Mojapelo.
By Joshua Warner; joshuawarner@alliancenews.com; @JoshAlliance
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Bushveld Minerals (BMN)