Australian penny stock Rox Resources, backed by mining major Teck Resources of Canada, said it has discovered one of the world’s largest zinc deposits in northern Australia, although any decision to mine is years away.
The discovery comes seven months after Chinese conglomerate MMG Ltd shut the nearby exhausted Century zinc mine, once the world’s third-biggest, leaving a hole in global supplies of the metal chiefly used to galvanise steel.
The lode, named Teena, holds 14.2 billion pounds of zinc, as well as 2.1 billion pounds of lead, making it around the same size as the Century deposit. Teena is located eight kms (5 miles) from the Glencore -owned McArthur River zinc mine.
Rox’s stock more than doubled on Wednesday on news of the find to just under three Australian cents a share, giving it a market value of A$34.2 million ($24.8 million), although it would likely be a decade before a mine is built, if at all.
“We’ve established that a significant resource is there and now we need to conduct more drilling and metallurgical work, which will not happen overnight,” Rox managing director Ian Mulholland said.
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