The following article released today by ****K**** (cannot be...

The following article released today by  ****K**** (cannot be named on H.C.)
These juniors show why the Lachlan Fold Belt remains one of Australia’s most exciting mineral provinces.

• Home to over 105Moz of gold and millions of tonnes of copper, the Lachlan Fold Belt doesn’t command the column inches like it should these days
• Godolphin Resources MD Jeneta Owens says the rocks in the New South Wales mineral province make it one of the best places in the world for a company to explore
• We bring you seven juniors looking to make it rain with discoveries in the LFB

The early gold rushes of New South Wales brought almost 370,000 immigrants to Australia in the year after the glint of the precious metal was found near Bathurst in February 1851.
They were soon overshadowed by far more spectacular discoveries in Victoria and eventually Western Australia.
But a renewed sense of adventure from exploration companies, new technology and a new way of looking at the complex geology of the Lachlan Fold Belt, home to over 105Moz of discovered gold, has seen a rush of explorers back into the State.

New South Wales may not have had the reputation for mining prowess of its western counterpart, aside from its dominant and controversial Hunter Valley thermal coal industry.
But it is home to major gold and copper mines like Cadia-Ridgway – commonly one of Australia’s three largest gold producers alongside Boddington and the Kalgoorlie Super Pit – Northparkes and Cobar.
And with major discoveries like Alkane Resources’ 10.1Moz gold equivalent Boda (2019) and a renewed sense of purpose from the NSW Government around fostering its mineral extraction industry – approving both Regis Resources’ McPhillamy’s gold mine and Silver Mines’ (ASX:SVL) Bowdens Silver project in a matter of weeks earlier this year – a new group of explorers is piling into the region.

March quarter exploration figures from the Australian Bureau of Statistics show $77 million was spent drilling in New South Wales in the first three months of 2023, without any data for coal, lithium or rare earths. That’s the third straight year in excess of $75m.
2022 saw a record $351.2m spent exploring for metals in the State, more than $100m more than the $247.4m ploughed into the ground just four years earlier in 2018.
Copper drilling hit an all-time March high of $20.8m as well, illuminating an important point. The Lachlan Fold Belt is not just a locale for gold rushes of the past, but a crucible for the energy transition metals that will propel the future.

It’s the rocks, stupid

So what is it that makes the Lachlan Fold Belt so special?
And why was it that a geological domain first pilfered by prospectors in 1851 took 140 years to deliver a discovery of the world-class scale and gravity of Cadia-Ridgway?
A renowned geologist, Jeneta Owens led the exploration team at China Molybdenum’s Northparkes copper and gold mine but since mid-2021 has been based in Orange as the managing director of Godolphin Resources (ASX:GRL).
Owner of the McPhillamy’s style Lewis Ponds gold deposit, Godolphin owns more than five projects and JV stakes in the region and recently announced a maiden resource at Narraburra,

THE REGIONS FIRST STANDALONE IONIC CLAY RARE EARTHS DEPOSIT.

She says the deep and hidden nature of the prospects in the Lachlan Fold Belt compared to locales with older rock formations like the Eastern Goldfields were a big reason the region remains underexplored.
“So the Eastern Goldfields are completely different kind of rock package,” she told *.
“The Macquarie Arc targets are probably a bit deeper. They’re also lower grade, so they’re very large scale mineral deposits.
“You normally have high tonnage deposits and I guess the age of them is a bit different as well because in geological settings around the world porphyry style mineralisation is known in younger sediments, younger volcanic rocks like in South America.
“The age of the rocks here and to have it still preserve that old volcanism is quite unique.”

Porphyry puzzle

Porphyry is a key word here. The vast majority of the world’s largest copper mines are bulk, low grade porphyries endowed with by-products like gold, silver and molybdenum.
These are either mined in large open pits or, like the 700,000-800,000ozpa Cadia mine, as underground block caves.
Delivering economies of scale, a block cave is mined by digging caverns beneath the mineralised ore and allowing the mass to collapse under its own weight, enabling huge portions of rock to be moved compared to the stoping method used in narrow-veined orebodies.
Another feature of discoveries in the Lachlan Fold Belt is the first resource is almost always the beginning, not the end. A mine like Northparkes, Owens notes, contains almost 1Bt of copper rich ore across a swathe of different, nearby deposits.
“That’s what’s unique about these types of deposits in the Lachlan Fold Belt, these porphyry styles,” Owens said.
“All of the major mines are not just one individual mine, they are a group of smaller operations or smaller deposits that are clustered together, so that clustering is very important to be able to provide those large tonnages.”
Despite its obvious fertility, most holes drilled across the expanse of the Macquarie Arc have never ventured below 150m deep.
“The area is still well endowed with minerals and there are new discoveries that can still be made,” Owens said.
“There was a period of time when people (thought) that everything that could be found had been found. And even working in the area, you sometimes can think that, but it’s still a place where you can walk across the ground and find copper mineralisation outcropping at surface.
“You can pick up rocks with visible gold, that’s quite rare. It’s not the normal kind of geological environment.”
Modern exploration technology is also helping companies like Godolphin make new discoveries and find new types of deposits within the Lachlan Fold Belt.
“It really does show that even after all this time of people exploring from the 1970s onwards, that new discoveries can be found, and it really is by peeling back the layers,” she said.
“There’s been a lot of research and development going into understanding the geological signatures of these deposits, advancements in geochemistry, advancements in mineral chemistry, things like hylogger capturing the spectral properties of rocks.
“That wasn’t available back in the ’70s and ’80s. And now geophysics has come a long way.
“And, you know, all of these things have led to a greater understanding of what the systems looks like and their large alteration systems, being able to hone in and discover.
“There’s obviously still more out there.”
World’s biggest companies muscling in

Rich in copper and now rare earths in the form of Godolphin’s Narraburra, the LFB is emerging as a key part of the world for supplying the commodities needed for renewables and electric vehicles, technology central to the global green energy transition.
The big buzz around the Lachlan Fold belt recently has also come from the development approvals at McPhillamy’s and Bowdens, as well as Newcrest’s takeover by US gold giant Newmont.
The biggest prize there was, clearly, Cadia.
Boasting at least a two-decade mine life and the potential to become a more than 100,000tpa copper producer alongside its gold bounty, the mine was not yet discovered when Newmont initially merged its Australian gold division with BHP’s and left Newcrest to fend for itself.
“It really does show that around the world these large companies aee the Lachlan Fold Belt as a place to be,” Owens said.
I want to speak to Lachlan, how do I reach him?

There are any number of established names to inspect when headed into the Lachlan Fold Belt.
Newcrest will be off the table soon. But Regis Resources (ASX:RRL) looks like a genuine shot at getting its McPhillamy’s mine off the ground and Bill Beament and Nev Power endorsed Metals Acquisition Corp has bought the 50,000tpa CSA mine in Cobar off Glencore with an Aussie IPO imminent.
Also producing in the region are companies like Aeris Resources (ASX:AIS), Aurelia Metals (ASX:AMI) and Alkane Resources (ASX:ALK), while Australian Strategic Materials demonstrates the versatility of the district.
It plans to develop the Dubbo zirconium and rare earths project and process the resulting metals into products like rare earth magnets at a plant in Korea.
But established, large and mid-cap players aren’t the exciting side of the market.
As Lion Selection Group’s (ASX:LSX) Hedley Widdup pointed out a couple of years ago, one of the reasons the Lachlan Fold Belt is such an exciting place for investors is that your money can go a lot further than spreading it across a market like WA.
“If you generate $15m worth of buying interest (in the Lachlan) it is spread across four or five stories as opposed to someone finding gold in Western Australia (where) the money spreads a lot more thinly,” he told * at the time.
We’ve combed over the prospects to identify seven exciting juniors kicking the tyres in the Lachlan Fold Belt who could strike it lucky in the LFB.

Godolphin Resources (ASX:GRL)

Spun out of Ardea Resources (ASX:ARL) in 2021, Godolphin’s initial focus was on a host of assets exploring for gold and copper in the Lachlan Fold Belt.
But it has recently shifted focus, making the Narraburra ionic clay rare earths deposit its primary asset with a resource upgrade in April that signposted the deposit as one of national and international significance.
Located 12km northwest of Temora in central west NSW, previous owners at Narraburra had outlined a JORC 2004 compliant mineral resource estimate.
But the new resource compiled by GRL bolstered its tonnage by 30% to 94.9Mt at 739ppm total rare earth oxides, with 50% of the resource indicated and 20Mt at 1079ppm TREO within the indicated resource above a 600ppm cutoff.
On top of that the 739ppm TREO reading represented a 126% increase in grade. ANSTO, Australia’s peak body for nuclear science and technology, has been undertaking work to characterise the mineralisation at Narrabura.
Test work to better understand its composition and processing pathways is expected to start in the next quarter leading into the start of scoping studies before the end of the year.
Initial met testing has been promising, with “exceptional recoveries” of around 94% neodymium and 90% praseodymium, the light rare earth elements associated with the magnets in EV motors and wind turbines.