Molyneux is joined at the Tempus board table by consultant geologist and Celsius Resources managing director Brendan Borg and accountant Melanie Ross.
Assuming a successful raising, Tempus will acquire a 90% interest in Montejinni Resources from Aurum Fabri, a privately run company owned by geologist Bill Oliver (who is behind the ongoing Sultan Resources IPO) and Auralia Mining Consulting boss Daniel Tuffin.
Montejinni owns its namesake project in the NT and Claypan Dam in SA's Gawler Craton.
With a planned listing date in late July, Tempus is seeking to raise A$5 million via the issue of 25 million 20c shares, with $3 million planned for exploration over the initial 24 months, with $1.6 million budgeted for the NT and $1.4 million in SA.
Montejinni has seen waves of exploration by the likes of Freeport in the late 1960s and others in the ‘90s, but has been largely untouched since 1997 although the Northern Territory Geological Survey recently completed a gravity survey across the Victoria Basin and defined a number of anomalies that are under cover and require follow-up ground surveys to assess if there are actually potential targets in the area.
Samples excavated from costeans in the ‘90s returned up to 21.7% copper, and the suggestion is the copper may be related to the contact between the Montejinni limestone and the Kalkarindji volcanic suite, and that there may be feeder zones that would be prospective for nickel and platinum group metals.
The geology has been compared to the Keweenawan basalts in the USA, which are responsible for the thick Lake Superior copper deposits and the gabbroic intrusives in the Norilsk area in Russia.
Work by Aurum Fabri, which amalgamated the past data, hints at a new exploration target with potential for a significant high-grade copper-zinc deposit, however the age of much of the data means a lot of the work needs to be validated with work on the ground.
The company wants to undertake surface exploration to define targets for drilling in 2019.
Claypan Dam, located about 65km from Tarcoola, has the potential to host a variety of mineralisation styles including iron-oxide copper gold, nickel-copper, iron-titanium‐phosphate, rare earth elements and banded iron formation ore deposits.
The project area includes a small granite intrusion, which could hint at copper-gold-uranium potential, and the igneous intrusion will be the initial focus of work to develop a geological model.
Kennecott first explored the area for nickel in the 1970s, but while a number of aeromagnetic anomalies were defined drilling struck the calcrete horizon and samples were not taken. It passed through the likes of BHP, Normandy and Platsearch over the years as explorers looked for gold, diamonds and coal without much success, and has been largely ignored since 2005.
