Tivan has secured a US$50 million financing package in key terms with Sumitomo Corporation and existing partner ETFS Capital to restart the long-idled Molyhil tungsten project in the Northern Territory. The deal includes a potential long-term offtake arrangement with Sumitomo, giving price and volume certainty for tungsten concentrate from the open-pit operation. Tivan is also formalising community partnerships with the Central Land Council and Traditional Owners, a critical step for approvals, land access and future expansion drilling around the Molyhil deposit.

New University of Sydney modelling of 3D plate tectonics and deep Earth flow fields explains why some ancient continental margins host large sedimentary copper systems while others with similar stratigraphy are barren. Led by Professor Dietmar Müller’s EarthByte Group and published in Nature Communications, the work links copper endowment to long-lived mantle upwellings, crustal thinning patterns and basin-scale fluid pathways rather than local geology alone. For explorers, the framework offers a way to rank frontier basins and re-evaluate “failed” provinces using geodynamic criteria.

Gina Rinehart has committed an initial $US50 million to California-based Lumitron Technologies, with scope to double the investment to $US100 million this year, backing its high-energy X-ray platform for ore characterisation and processing. Lumitron’s technology, originally developed for medical imaging and security, generates tunable, monochromatic X-rays that could enable real-time ore sorting and more precise recovery compared with conventional broad-spectrum X-ray systems. For miners, the move signals growing interest in advanced sensor-based sorting to lift recovery from lower-grade ores and reduce downstream processing loads.