Tivan nears 37km drilling at Speewah: resource and pit design notes for engineers
Reviewed by Tom Sullivan

First reported on Australian Mining
30 Second Briefing
Tivan is close to completing a roughly 37,000‑metre drilling campaign at its Speewah fluorite project in Western Australia’s Kimberley, including 12,809 metres drilled in the 2026 programme with about 1275 metres remaining. The work is aimed at delivering an updated JORC mineral resource estimate and the project’s first ore reserve ahead of a final investment decision. For geotechnical and mine planning teams, the expanded drill density should tighten grade continuity models and support more detailed pit designs and geotechnical domains.
Technical Brief
- Fluorite (fluorspar) focus suggests potential downstream use in acid-grade and metallurgical-grade products.
- Kimberley climatic conditions mean drilling and future open-pit operations must accommodate intense wet-season rainfall.
- Remote WA setting points to likely reliance on long-haul road transport for reagents and concentrate.
- Project scale and remoteness indicate early need to assess on-site power mix (diesel, gas, renewables).
- Fluorite’s role in steelmaking and chemicals links project economics to steel and HF market volatility.
- Similar fluorite projects often require careful pit-wall control due to veining and variable rock mass quality.
- For comparable mining projects, such early drilling density typically de-risks slope design and haul-road geometry.
Our Take
Speewah in Western Australia and Sandover in the Northern Territory now give Tivan two advanced fluorite fronts in our database, which suggests the company is positioning itself as a multi-asset CaF₂ supplier rather than relying on a single flagship deposit.
The earlier appointment of ICA Natural Resources as debt finance adviser for the Speewah fluorite project indicates that near-complete drilling here is likely feeding directly into bankable studies and financing models, rather than just early-stage exploration.
With only a handful of fluorite‑keyword pieces in our coverage compared with 1276 Mining stories overall, Tivan’s repeated appearances across fluorite, tungsten and critical minerals items signal it as one of the more active Australian juniors in niche industrial minerals and specialty metals.
Prepared by collating external sources, AI-assisted tools, and Geomechanics.io’s proprietary mining database, then reviewed for technical accuracy & edited by our geotechnical team.
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