Kristie Batten: Asian Battery Metals eyes scale-up of copper-nickel discovery

Asian Battery Metals believes it may have made a significant copper-nickel-platinum group element discovery at its Oval project in Mongolia.

Mongolian grams: AZ9 has great expectations for its Oval project, writes Kristie Batten. Pic: supplied

One of Australia’s top mining journalists, Kristie Batten, writes for Stockhead every week in her regular column placing a watchful eye on the movers and shakers of the small cap resources scene.

Asian Battery Metals (ASX:AZ9) believes it may have made a significant copper-nickel-platinum group element discovery at its Oval project in Mongolia.

AZ9, which listed on the ASX last year, was previously focused on its more advanced graphite and lithium projects in Mongolia, though Oval was selected to be part of BHP’s Xplor exploration accelerator in 2023.

The company used the US$500,000 of funding provided by the program to drill Oval.

In October 2024, AZ9 reported a hit of 8.8m at 6.08% copper, 3.19% nickel, 1.63 grams per tonne platinum, palladium and gold (E3) and 0.11% cobalt, or 12.57% copper equivalent from 107.2m.

Since then, the company has been focused on expanding the scale of the discovery.

Earlier this month, AZ9 reported an intersection of 8.7m at 2.44% copper, 1.52% nickel, 1.4g/t E3 and 0.06% cobalt from 112.8m, including 2m at 3.72% copper, 3.82% nickel, 1.65g/t E3 and 0.16% cobalt, 130m down-dip of a previous intercept.

The results suggest semi-continuous mineralisation extends over 800m, including North Oval and the Oval gabbroic intrusion.

Planning underway

The recent focus for AZ9 has been electromagnetics to define targets for the next round of drilling.

“Electromagnetic is the go-to tool for this type of mineralisation, so we brought Gap Geophysics, the Australian company, to the field, and they are working currently,” AZ9 managing director Gan-Ochir Zunduisuren told Stockhead.

“Based on that work, we're hoping that we'll have multiple targets to drill on top of whatever we have from our ground EM work.”

On Friday, AZ9 announced that the ground-based fixed loop electromagnetic survey at Oval was halfway through but had already resulted in 29 conductive plates being modelled across four target zones.

Six priority one plates have been identified with strong geophysical responses.

The focus of the remainder of the program is the deeper zones and step-out targets, including MS1, MS2 and Quartz Hill targets.

Zunduisuren said the program to date had delivered the results the company were hoping for.

“I think the next stage of drilling is going to be quite instrumental for us,” he said.

Drilling is set to resume in early August, while the first round of metallurgical test work results will also be released this quarter.

“The strategy for this year is to really show the size and the extent of the mineralisation to get the feeling of how large the potential is, and if we can get that by the end of the year, next year we're going to drill for a resource,” Zunduisuren said.

“We have very limited historic information. This is a brand new area, even in Mongolia, in the southwest part where we are working.

“I don't think there have been any historic magmatic mafic intrusion-related copper and nickel sulphide systems before, so this is brand new in this sense, so we really have to do everything from ground up.

“That's why we certainly believe that there is definitely a potential for camp-scale or clusters of orebodies within a few kilometres or a few tens of kilometres from each other.”

Mongolia still emerging

Despite Mongolia being home to Rio Tinto’s massive Oyu Tolgoi copper-gold mine, Zunduisuren said it was still misunderstood as a destination.

“The last round of real investor interest was in the early 2000s,” he said.

“That's when we had a big flow of investment from Australia and Canada, especially in the gold space in Mongolia, and then the copper space.

“Knowing all the moving parts there, I think Mongolia will probably become quite interesting for investors over the next few years.”

Zunduisuren said Mongolia was a mature mining destination with the right regulatory frameworks in place to support the industry.

“Infrastructure wise, it's vastly improved over the last 15 years,” he said.

“Just based on that, it’s way better positioned to attract investment than 15 years ago.”

The ASX’s only other Mongolia-focused copper player, Xanadu Mines, is set to disappear shortly after accepting a $180 million takeover offer.

Xanadu accepted the 8c per share offer – a 57% premium – and the acquirer Bastion Mining moved to compulsory acquisition on Friday.

It will result in one less copper developer on the ASX, a space which is already reasonably thin.

“I think the key for larger institutional investors or corporates, they're definitely looking, of course, and observing how we progressing further,” Zunduisuren said.

“To really make their minds up, there's two things that need to be there. One is a quantity. The other is quantity.

“With our current results, we have shown there's definitely a quality of the product there, but we need to show the quantity and that's the whole strategy of this year's exploration.”

At Stockhead we tell it like it is. While Asian Battery Metals is a Stockhead advertiser at the time of writing, it did not sponsor this article. 

Originally published as Kristie Batten: Asian Battery Metals eyes scale-up of copper-nickel discovery