talk about busy !

News you can use.

Robin Bromby | August 17, 2009
Article from: The Australian.

EACH day the investor faces an uphill struggle to keep on top of the news, sorting out which announcements open up a chance to get set in a stock before the rest of the market wakes up.

Two announcements caught our eye before the market opened this morning.

First, Hazelwood Resources sent out more news that just adds to the appeal of its Big Hill tungsten project (which is the subject of a pre-feasibility study and where recent drilling has turned up some exceptional intersections). Now the company’s drill rig has hit some shallow mineralisation at the nearby McLeods project, which is part of the historic Cookes Creek field (where there was tungsten mining between 1951 and 1967). Shareholders must be hugging themselves that Hazelwood’s earlier plan to spin Big Hill off into a new company was scuttled by the first shock waves that hit commodities in the recent downturn.

Then Stuart Petroleum said a technical study of its Oliver discovery in the Timor Sea (a map is included in the announcement) had delivered a 68 per cent upgrade to the recoverable resource of gas, oil and condensate. The new figure is 32.6 million barrels.

But, as we promised in the Pure Speculation column in this morning’s The Australian, quite a few things late last week slipped through the media net and we said we would draw your attention to these online today.

Tin has been in the doldrums lately, but we heard on Friday that a Canadian broker is taking a close interest in Kasbah Resources and its tin project in Morocco. The existing resource is 6m tonnes at 0.9 per cent tin, and now a new drilling program has begun on another zone. The other story to watch is Central West Gold . This junior continues to survive on the smell of an oily rag and is about to start a new drill program at the site of the historic Ottery tin mine in far north NSW.

Talk about busy. Montezuma Mining Co is not letting the grass grow under its feet. Rock chip sampling at its Butcher Bird project, 120km south of Newman in Western Australia (and which straddles the Great Northern Highway), has returned assays up to 44.4 per cent manganese. The samples were taken over a 8km-long strike zone. Meanwhile, the junior has also revised its gold resource at the Jubilee project, 120km north of Meekatharra - which is becoming a very busy part of the world these days. The resource is now up 40 per cent to 605,000 tonnes at 2.41 grams/tonne, or 46,800 contained ounces of gold. And Sinosteel Midwest has begun drilling at MZM’s Mt Padbury ground; the Chinese-owned company has bought the iron ore rights and MZM stands to receive further cash payments and royalties once resource targets are achieved.

And one mining veteran attending the NSW Exploration & Investment Conference on Thursday came away impressed with one part of the presentation by Minotaur Exploration . This company and Platsearch are combining their tenements known as the Thomson project, north of Broken Hill, into a new company (to be called Thomson Resources). Our informant was fascinated by the details of potential for a large lead-zinc-silver find.

The writer implies no investment recommendation and this report contains material that is speculative in nature. Investors should seek professional investment advice.