| 61 T T Hugh de Lacy Price for antimony ore skyrockets Exploratory drilling at Siren Gold’s Auld Creek project near Reefton. Siren Gold REGIONAl DEVELOPMENT “It’s already in use to a small degree in lithium batteries, solar panel glass and windmill turbines, but the stibnitecalcium liquid battery demand is potentially going to take it into a different realm altogether.” It started out primarily interested in gold, as its name would suggest, and while Siren Gold’s hunt for the yellow metal at Reefton on the West Coast is hugely promising, it’s the antimony that it’s encountered in the same drill-holes that is revving up interest in the Australian-listed company. “Antimony has become a recognised new green metal with a sky-rocketing price because of its future in large-grid storage batteries,” Siren Gold Technical Director Paul Angus says. The current price is around $US20,000 a tonne ($NZ32,000/t) which is 55% higher than this time last year. Antimony (Sb) ore is extracted primarily from stibnite typically occurring in association with gold, which remains the primary focus of Siren Gold’s exploration. Antimony, thanks in part to Bill Gates’ backing of American company Ambri, suddenly has a glowing future in the manufacture of electrical batteries. Just three years ago Gates sank $US144m into financing the commercialisation of calcium-antimony liquid batteries which have twice the shelf-life of the currently standard lithium ion batteries. “It’s already in use to a small degree in lithium batteries, solar panel glass and windmill turbines, but the stibnite-calcium liquid battery demand is potentially going to take it into a different realm altogether,” Paul says. World production of stibnite is currently only around 110,000t/year, most of it from China and Russia, with a small amount from Australia. Siren began to explore for antimony last year at its Auld Creek project in Reefton. A recent Siren Gold drill hole intersected at 12.4m 14.9% antimony, as well as a rich 5.3 grams per tonne of gold, offering an antimony alone gold equivalent of an additional 28g. Much of Siren Gold’s tenement area was explored by Oceana Gold, the country’s biggest gold-miner, before it relinquished those permits to concentrate on other productive mines. Siren Gold has been drilling on its tenements for nearly four years, and it’s got a lot more exploration to go before it can start moving into the consenting and then production stages, Paul says. “Since then Siren has amassed a resource of 444,000oz of gold and 8700t of antimony, with these resources expected to increase with ongoing exploration. “With gold and antimony prices at historic highs, the potential is very significant,” Paul says. “We’ve got two years of exploration ahead of us before we progress to the development stage, and at the moment we’ve got about ten staff and contractors working on the project.” He said that the present government’s recently expressed support for the mining industries was also encouraging. “It’s obviously refreshing to have the support of the Government,” says Paul. “And that plus the emergence of antimony as another valuable resource in addition to gold helps us to raise money to get the exploration done. “It’s a lot harder to get investment from the New Zealand capital markets than it is in Australia where mining has a much bigger profile,” he says. “But the public endorsement of the industry by the New Zealand Government will carry weight in both markets.” Natural Resources Natural Resources
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