Ganfeng has signed an access agreement to support construction of a brine-bearing pipeline planned to extend from Ganfeng's Mariana project, which will cross PepinNini's Santa Ines copper-gold project in Argentina's Salta Province.

 

The deal will see the pair jointly fund an IP survey along the 11km-long proposed pipeline route.

 

"For PepinNini it will be an exploration tool for copper-gold mineralisation targets for drill testing, while it will give Ganfeng reassurance that the pipeline trace will not require relocation in the event of a mineral discovery," managing director Rebecca Holland-Kennedy said.

 

The 12-day survey will be completed in October.

 

Santa Ines is located in the same geological structure and setting as BHP's world-class Escondida mine in Chile, 80km away.

 

Over the past year PepinNini has been planning two boreholes to test priority copper-gold targets within Santa Ines targeting the historical Santa Ines mine at depth, and the El Obsequio prospect about 300m away.

 

PepinNini also has lithium brine interests in the Salta province, with resources of 600,000 tonnes lithium and 270,000t potash declared for the Rincon project. 

 

Earlier this week it announced interim results from a blending study of brines from Rincon and Incahuasi, saying the work had concentrated the 4000 litre blended samples to 8500 milligrams per kilogram, 14 times that of Incahuasi brine and seven times that of Rincon brine, after evaporation trials in Chile.

 

It said those results compared favourably with the 7000mg/kg reported by Orocobre at Olaroz, about 100km to the north.

 

While the trials have another month to run, the preliminary results suggest that the brine blending process is viable and highly effective, the company said.

 

PepinNini shares jumped some 50% today, reaching an intraday peak of 65c, just shy of its 12-month high of 67.5c.

 

Mid-morning it was still up 45% at 59c, valuing it at $27 million.