Lonmin pitches tent in Sudbury camp

London-listed Lonmin has inked a deal with Wallbridge Mining (WM-T) to explore several of the company’s magmatic sulphide properties in the Sudbury basin of Ontario.

The deal covers 19 projects and calls for US$4.1 million in exploration expenditures this year and another US$400,000 in 2003. Lonmin must provide US$2 million each year thereafter to keep the agreement valid; it will receive a half-interest in a property once an indicated resource has been outlined.

Upon vesting its interest, Lonmin can elect to become the project operator. It can raise its stake to 65% by funding exploration required to complete a feasibility study and must arrange all development financing to advance the deposit to production.

The 2001 budget allocates US$1.5 million to the Windy Lake property, US$700,000 to the Ministic Offset property and the remainder to the other 17 properties. Windy Lake was acquired in early December 2001 after the Ontario government lifted a staking ban that had been in effect for 80 years.

Situated on the basin’s northern rim, Windy Lake covers 4.7 km of the contact between the Sudbury basin and footwall rocks. The property is 3 km southwest of the Levack deposits, which have yielded some 202 million tonnes of ore over the past century.

So far, Wallbridge has completed a geophysical survey over part of Windy Lake to explore for mineralization beneath it. The survey outlined two conductive zones with coinciding resistivity anomalies that would seem to reflect the contact zone enclosed in an embayment structure.

Lonmin is the world’s third-largest underground miner of primary platinum, after Anglo American Platinum and Impala Platinum, which are already exploring for platinum group metals in layered ultramafic and mafic igeneous complexes east and west of Sudbury.