Red Metal Advances Drilling at Queensland’s Sybella Rare Earths Project

Red Metal has initiated a 5,000-metre drilling tilt at its Sybella rare-earths project near Mount Isa, Queensland. The program combines infill drilling in the southeast corner of the nearly five-billion-tonne resource with extensional drilling that tests a southeast extension of the Kary Zone, where limited historic work hints at higher-grade mineralisation. Management says the effort builds on two years of mapping and metallurgical results aimed at confirming a low-cost, heap-leach development scenario for the deposit.

The Sydney Morning Herald

Column-leach trials have already shown extraction rates of 70–78 percent for the magnet-critical rare earths neodymium and praseodymium using a low-intensity acid leaching process. Red Metal reports that mining-scale column leach tests—a six-metre column and a coarser-crush two-metre test—have been launched, with results slated for release in the coming months. The forthcoming data will be extrapolated into economic models that underpin the resource upgrade.

The Sydney Morning Herald

The company expects assay results from the current drilling campaign early in the new year. Those results will feed an updated mineral-resource estimate for the Kary Zone, which in turn will inform the final mine model for a prefeasibility study scheduled for completion in the first quarter of next year. Red Metal’s leadership describes this milestone as a critical step toward de-risking the flagship asset.

The Sydney Morning Herald

In parallel with the rare-earths work, Red Metal is advancing a “Big Copper” strategy that seeks iron-oxide-copper-gold (IOCG) discoveries in the Mt Isa province. The target area lies near the Ernest Henry and Osborne deposits, approximately 20 kilometres from the major mining hub, positioning the company to potentially broaden its commodity portfolio while leveraging existing regional infrastructure.

The Sydney Morning Herald