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Apollo Minerals (ASX:AON) announced that it has entered into an agreement to buy Aurenere, a project located in the northern Spanish province of Lleida, right next door to the company’s Couflens tungsten and gold project, which is in France.
Within the terms of the agreement, Apollo will acquire 75% of the share capital of NeoMetal Spania S.L, which holds the rights to the 100% interest in the Aurenere Project. The commercial terms of the acquisition of the upfront interest in Neometal include €100,000 cash upfront and a further €150,000 upon the grant of the Investigation Permit.
Aurenere is a 55-square-kilometre property that contains an extension of the tungsten and gold strike at Couflens. Both properties combined would give Apollo 97 square kilometres of landholding in the Pyrenees.
In a press release, the London/Perth-based company explained that the rationale behind the buyout is that recent field campaigns carried out within the Couflens license area confirmed the presence of widespread tungsten, up to 8.25% WO3, and high-grade gold, up to 24.5 g/t. “These campaigns highlighted significant potential for shear hosted gold mineralisation to be associated with large fault structures extending to the west of the Salau mine area towards the Aurenere Project,” the statement reads.
The aforementioned Salau mine is a historic operation in the area, considered one of the world’s highest-grade tungsten mines between 1971 and 1986.
Aurenere still has to get an Investigation Permit from the General Directorate of Energy, Mines and Industrial Security of the Government of Catalonia. The application to obtain such license was submitted by NeoMetal Spania in March 2016.
Comments
Terry
On the French side, the proposed reopening of the Salau mine is very controversial. An apparently vast segment of the local population is opposed to the project. The local Mayor resurrected an administrative order shutting down the road necessary to access the site (there is no other access possible). The Mayor’s order is based on safety considerations. The Prefect appealed the order to the Administrative Court (jurisdiction of first instance), which confirmed the Mayor’s authority in December 2017. Most probably, the Administrative Court’s decision will be (or has been)appealed to the Conseil d’État in Paris (court of last ressort, equivalent for this purpose to the Supreme Court in the US).
In addition, the mine is reported to contain asbestos. Air samples were taken in December to ensure that workers could eventually access the galleries. Authorities deemed the results irrelevant since the mine is not in operation. The asbestos issue therefore remains unsolved. It will resurface if and when a permit is solicited to start operations (including preliminary feasibility studies) on site.