Cobra Resources has published the maiden mineral resource estimate for its Wudinna rare earth project on South Australia’s Eyre Peninsula: 150 million tonnes grading 470 parts per million total rare earth oxides, for 70,400 tonnes of contained TREO. The estimate is reported to JORC standards and will underpin the Wudinna scoping study.
The resource covers the Boland ionic clay discovery and has been assessed for two mining methods. For mineralisation in the Pidinga formation amenable to in situ recovery, Cobra applied an economic cut over of US$5.27 a tonne; for open pittable material it used a cut off of 200 ppm TREO excluding cerium. The company says drilling can grow the resource further, and its five pillar strategy targets production at bottom quartile costs.
Boland’s distinction is the mining method. It is the only Australian rare earth project identified as suitable for in situ recovery, where lixiviant is injected into a confined palaeochannel and rare earths are recovered from solution rather than by digging and hauling clay. Earlier metallurgical work showed recovery varying by target, about 80 percent at the Boland wellfield against 52 percent at Head, which the scoping study will need to characterise across the resource.
Cobra is also advancing the Manna Hill copper project in the same state, where its Blue Rose discovery has returned long copper and gold intersections. For Wudinna, the next steps are the scoping study and engineering for a small scale in situ recovery demonstration targeted for the first half of 2027, intended to produce commercial quantities of mixed rare earth oxides. Rare earth miners were down 0.27 percent on the day and 5.11 percent on the week in the latest market tables, so the resource lands in a weak tape for the subsector.