Diggers & Dealers 2026: All the latest news from Day 3 of the annual mining forum in Kalgoorlie-Boulder

Australian Vanadium says it is trying to create the same business model that others have forged on the path to lithium-ion supply chains for its own batteries.

“They’re very good at long duration, so the hallmark of a vanadium flow battery is the longer the duration ... where almost other, all other technologies have the opposite correlation,” said boss Graham Arvidson.

“And so then you’re probably going to ask me, well, why aren’t these being adopted more quickly?

“I think there’s a very simple answer that the market hasn’t quite been there, and we’ve been surprised that people are actually not selecting superior life cycle economics; they’re selecting sticker price.”

Australian Vanadium late last month submitted a proposal for the State Government’s $150 million, 50MW/10-hour, or 500MWh, vanadium flow battery.

The company said it proposed to build, own and operate the battery, which was designed to provide long-duration energy storage and support energy security, renewable energy integration, and network resilience in the Goldfields.

Arvidson said its was inevitable that Australia would need to embrace new storage technologies to diversify the mix, adding “vanadium flow batteries are literally the only storage technology that’s fully commercialised for decades at gigawatt-hour scale, that is ready to scale up and can actually be delivered competitively domestically”.

He asked delegates to not “lose faith” in the lacklustre vanadium price “because it has a lot of reasons to go up”.

“Australian vanadium is ready, and the flow batteries are expanding all over the world. Keep an eye on us,” he said.

Nixon is focusing heavily on the “unique” synergies of a Genesis-Vault merger.

“We’re going to be able to optimise all sources, prioritise mills, allocate capital across a deeper project pipeline, we’ll be able to use our balance sheet to accelerate the best projects and ultimately defer the lower margin ones,” he said.

“Importantly, the ambition and commitment is to retain the agility, cost discipline, and people first culture that made Genesis successful and is visible throughout the Vault business.

“If the gold price remains strong, again we can bring forward the best assets, the best opportunities.”

He pointed to a $750m cost saving on construction of a new mill by processing ore from Genesis’ Tower Hill mine through Vault’s nearby King of the Hills facility.

He added the success of the combination would be driven by the quality of its workforce, the capability of its leadership team, “and ultimately the experience of a management group that has repeatedly demonstrated its ability to integrate assets, unlock value, improve performance, and importantly, deliver on commitments”.

“So, we really look forward to delivering on that opportunity that lies ahead, and creating a significant efforts from what we believe is one of the most compelling combinations seen in the Australian gold sector for many years,” he said.

Genesis Minerals’ CEO Matthew Nixon is busy talking up the company’s $12.6 merger with Vault Minerals, announced last month

“The combined group would become a top-three Australian gold producer and a top 20 global gold miner by capitalisation,” he told delegates.

“Now global investors they want gold exposure, but they also want investable companies with strong balance sheets, long assets, growth pathways, and credible management teams.

“This merged group would offer all of that with one additional advantage: district consolidation.

“This combination gives us production scale today, but more importantly, it gives us operational flexibility for the next 10 years and beyond.

“We see this as a rare opportunity that strategic, operational, and financial logic all point in the same direction. We’re targeting completion in November this year.”

Nixon said the merged group would immediately have 600,000 to 700,000 ounces of production, “and the dominant position in what is an 85 million ounce district in Leonora to Leonora-Laverton.”

Expect a packed house for the next speaker, Matthew Nixon, CEO of Rayleigh Finlayson’s Genesis Minerals.

Pantoro Gold is targetting production of between 90,000 and 105,000 ounces this financial year and tipping “very strong” cash generation potential as the price of the precious metal holds above $US4000.

It’s a turnaround story from a few years ago when the miner was “just surviving”, according to MD Paul Cmrlec.

“We barely had a pulse.”

Pantoro Gold last month said it was taking steps to turn around its performance after revealing production at the Norseman gold project fell short of its revised guidance in the 2026 financial year.

Production came in at 77,408oz, down on the 84,536oz produced in FY25 and short of its revised FY26 guidance of 86,000oz to 92,000oz, which had been set in March from the original target of 100,000oz to 110,000oz.

Cmrlec told delegates the miner now had a balance sheet “that will allow the company to continue to power forward”.

“In the longer term, our aim is to replace all of that lower grade open pit material with high grade underground material and take our production to 200,000oz-plus,” he said.

“So it won’t happen overnight, but I believe that it will happen. Our processing plant is in a great position to do that for us.”

Cmrlec said the Norseman belt had been unloved for three decades and Pantoro was “just touching the tip of the iceberg here” in the “most prospective goldfield in Western Australia”.

“We already have a reserve that’s roughly three times bigger than it has been in its whole 100-year history, and aiming to double that again,” he said.

WA1 Resources says its Luni niobium project on the WA/Northern territory border has the potential to crack the global monopoly on supply of the highly critical mineral.

It is essential for producing high-strength, low-alloy steels, and is “irreplaceable” in modern defence, aerospace, and medical technologies, managing director Paul Savich told delegates.

He said about 73 per cent of current global supply of niobium comes from CBMM’s privately owned Araxá project in Minas Gerais in Brazil.

Luni, he said, was the highest quality undeveloped niobium deposit globally and, as a sign of its significance to the supply of critical minerals among allied nations, was awarded major project status by the Australian Fovernment in 2025.

“There is no undeveloped niobium deposit on Earth that comes close to the scale and grade of Luni,” Savich said.

“Our pre-feasibility study is on track for release next quarter, and that data is already enabling meaningful decisions and discussions toward our ideal project partnering, delivery models, and funding.

“We’re not following a conventional stage development path.

“We’ve brought forward key permitting and approvals processes so they can inform our feasibility studies, and this enables an efficient feedback loop between these integrated work streams at the optimal time.”

Savich said the fastest growth in demand for the critical material was coming from China, which - unlike most commodities - does not have any domestic supply.

“Despite the fact that a niobium supply disruption would potentially have a greater impact than rare earth elements, and Luni is so significant that it has the potential to take niobium off the critical mineral list of many allied nations.”

In closing, he said the world does not simply need more critical mineral projects.

“It needs the few projects that can genuinely change supply chains, and Luni is one of the few projects that is capable of doing exactly that,” he said.

Emerald Resources’ MD Morgan Hart is now up and is touting the gold miner’s organic growth prospects in Cambodia and Australia.

Its producing Okvau gold mine in Cambodia has turned out 410,000 ounces to June 2025 since commissioning in September 2021 - with 100,000oz over thelast financial year - and it is now looking for firm up its Dingo Range project in the far northern Goldfields.

It also has a new high-grade prospect in Cambodia.

“We’ve turned (Dingo range) into 1.4 million ounces of resources,” Hart said.

“We’re now currently calculating reserves on those, while expanding those resources.

“At the same time, that project’s fully licensed for development. We’ve already built the camp. We’ve broken ground on the mill. It’s on its way, and it’ll be in production over the next 12 to 14 months.

“In Cambodia, we found a second project from the Okvau mine, very similar, the Memot gold project. It’s 1.7moz of resources we’ve calculated there or discovered there over the last two and a half years, and we expect that to expand again.”

Emerald last month awarded a $562.5 million contract to Thiess subsidiary MACA Mining for the development of Dingo Range north-east of Leinster.

The company said the contract for Dingo Range was for more than six years — 74 months — and involved drill and blast, load and haul, run-of-mine crusher feed, mine development, ancillary mining services and associated services.

The development of Dingo Range is part of Emerald’s push to become a multi-mine gold producer of more than 300,000oz a year.

“We’ve got the right producing asset at Okvau to underpin our growth,” Hart told delegates.

“We’ve got a great organic growth story of the two projects we’ve currently got into development, and clearly with a billion dollars worth of free cash flow which comes out of those, we can grow the company further.”

BlackRock is Emerald’s biggest shareholder, with a 9.5 per cent stake.

Hart owes 6 per cent, with other directors also hold a near 6 pe rcent piece of the $3.7 billiob listed company.

Lithium is an incredibly exciting industry. New new growth sectors, new growth markets, but it’s incredibly volatile. 

That was the start of Dale Henderson’s closing remarks this morning for PLS at Diggers.

“Now to navigate that, we have to move from resources to reliable suppliers about quality assets, execution economics, and alignment,” he said.

“That is the playbook, and that is the strategy PLS has been pursuing. That’s what’s delivered our strong track record, and that’s what we’re pursuing as we move forward.”

Henderson said PLS was now in study mode, with more details to come in the December quarter.

PLS hopes a feasibility study to push Pilgangoora’s production capacity to 2 million tonnes a year — by constructing a new concentrator adjacent to the existing Pilgan processing facility — would be released by the end of 2026.

“If it’s anything like the first level of study that we did on June 24, we’re looking for hopefully an exciting set of outcomes.

“The June 24 study not only demonstrated a much larger operation, it demonstrated a lower operating cost and an exciting set of economic returns.”

It is targeting 2027 financial year production of between 1.03Mt and 1.1Mt.

PLS’s Dale Henderson was keen for delegates to keep an ey on one slide from his presentation.

“This is the slide I’d like you to remember,” he said.

“What you see here is the pricing curve, the wiggly line, and the columns are our cash margin generated from the operating platform.

“So you can see for the quarter of June, those 12 weeks, the business cleared over $500 million, half a billion in cash operating margin, one quarter alone.”

“And bear in mind that yield of circa $500m of cash operating margin for June quarter alone, that was at a headline realised price lower than the $US2465 a tonne, the $US2465 long-term price benchmark.

“So, when you consider this, the mind boggles in terms of the cash-generating potential of this business, depending on what price outlook you want to pick”.

Taking the stage first this morning will be Dale Henderson from lithum major PLS.

A bumper June quarter saw the Pilbara lithium miner boost production of spodumene concentrate 17 per cent from the previous year to 879,500 tonnes — 10,000t above its full-year forecast.

The recovery in lithium prices over the past year more than doubled revenue to $1.7 billion, growing PLS’ cash on hand from $974 million to $2.3 billion as it also booked $US600m from the issue of a senior note due in 2031.

But Henderson said he was not keen to whip out the company’s bulging wallet for an acquisition anytime soon.

We’ll hear more about expansion plans at PLS’s Pilgangoora production hub near Port hedland shortly.