PERTH (miningweekly.com) – Junior Blackstone Minerals has exercised its option to acquire a 90% interest in the Ta Khoa nickel/platinum group metals project, in Northern Vietnam.
The company in May last year inked an option agreement with owner AMR Nickel to acquire a 90% stake in the project, and under that agreement, would now issue 8.6-million shares, valued at A$1-million.
The share issue would be subject to shareholder approval.
The exercise to acquire the majority interest in the Ta Khoa project means that Blackstone has now completed an important condition precedent to its share purchase agreement with Korea’s largest nickel-rich cathode materials manufacturer EcoPro.
Under the purchase agreement, EcoPro will acquire 40-million shares in Blackstone at a price of 17c each, representing a 62% premium to the company’s last trading price.
Blackstone will now work to deliver a maiden resource at the Ta Khoa project by the third quarter of this year, and will initially focus on the disseminated sulfide at Ban Phuc and investigate the potential restart of the existing Ban Phuc concentrator.
The company will also investigate the potential to develop downstream processing infrastructure in Vietnam to produce a downstream nickel and cobalt product to supply to Asia’s growing lithium-ion battery industry.