Untapped PGM exploration areas.

• Author: ROSS, IAN

Mustang Minerals intends to make a breakthrough in platinum group metals (PGM) exploration on property near Sudbury that yields 'tremendous' potential.

Although River Valley and East Bull Lake garner the most attention as the centre of PGM activity near Sudbury, Mustang Minerals president Robin Dunbar says all of the right indicator rocks are appearing on their Drury Township property west of the city and they plan to being drilling later this year.

"The property is smaller, but it should have just as much potential (as River Valley and East Bull Lake)," says Dunbar, one of the featured speakers at the Northeastern Ontario Mineral Symposium in Sudbury last month.

"The rocks that comprise East Bull Lake, River Valley and Drury are older rocks and don't have the high copper-nickel content, but has a platinum dominant system so the major metal you're going to find in these rocks is palladium."

Dunbar says most of the indicators from the offset dykes and footwalls around the Sudbury Igneous Complex are really copper-nickel targets associated with platinum group metals.

PGMs consist of platinum, palladium, rhodium, iridium, osmium and ruthenium - six metals usually found together in nature, along with nickel and copper. They are highlyprized in the auto industry for use in catalytic converters, in electronics to coat hard drives and in the Asian jewelry market.

In 1996...