Benz Mining (ASX:BNZ) finds tungsten across 12km of Glenburgh gold ground

Coarse scheelite and ferberite sit alongside high-grade gold intercepts, opening a possible by-product credit no one priced in

Benz Mining Corp (ASX:BNZ) has confirmed widespread tungsten mineralisation across the entire 12km Glenburgh mineralised corridor in Western Australia. The tungsten sits inside the same gold zones the company is already drilling out, including a 26m interval at 0.24% WO3 nested within 79m at 4.4g/t gold.

Importantly, this is not a pivot. Management is clear that Glenburgh remains a gold story, and the scale of the gold system is what is driving the planned ramp-up to 12 RC drill shifts across the Hurricane, Icon and Thunderbolt camps. That is one of the larger active gold exploration programs running in Australia right now.

But the tungsten changes the economic picture in a quiet way. If coarse-grained scheelite and ferberite can be recovered as a by-product through conventional gravity circuits, Glenburgh stops being a pure gold project and starts looking like a polymetallic system with an embedded option on a critical mineral.

We think the market has so far been pricing this name as a gold explorer with a 510koz starter resource. Today’s release argues there is a second leg to the story that has not been valued at all.

The fusion re-assay program is the technical detail that actually matters

Routine four-acid digest assays under-report tungsten when the mineral is locked in resistant phases like scheelite and ferberite. Benz has been re-running selected intervals using lithium borate fusion, which fully digests those minerals, and the numbers are coming back materially higher.

The three headline holes (25GLR023, 25GLR070 and 26HZ002) all returned meaningful WO3 intervals from the re-assay work. The implication is that historical drilling across Glenburgh almost certainly contains tungsten that was never properly captured in the original assay files.

That gives Benz a low-cost way to grow a tungsten inventory without drilling a single new hole. The re-assay batches are due to come out over the next few months, and each one is effectively a free option on the share price.

Hand-panning tungsten is a quietly bullish metallurgical signal

Buried in the announcement is the line that simple hand panning produced visible tungsten-rich concentrates from RC samples. One sample assayed at 0.94% WO3 in its unconcentrated form, and the scheelite was coarse enough to be picked out with a pan.

That matters because it points toward conventional gravity recovery rather than expensive flotation circuits. Coarse-grained tungsten that responds to gravity is the kind of metallurgy that bolts onto a gold plant cheaply, which is exactly the scenario any future Glenburgh development would want.

Formal testwork has now started at ALS Metallurgy, running alongside the gold metallurgical program. The results from that work, due in coming months, will determine whether the tungsten by-product story is investable or just geologically interesting.

What this does to the valuation conversation

Glenburgh’s existing resource is 16.3Mt at 1.0g/t gold for 510,100 ounces. That is the number the market has been working with. The drilling ramp-up at Hurricane, Icon and Thunderbolt is squarely aimed at pushing that toward a multi-million-ounce profile, which is the primary near-term catalyst.

The skeptical read is that tungsten by-product credits are easy to talk about and notoriously hard to monetise at small scale. Plenty of Australian gold projects carry low-grade base-metal intervals that never make it into the economic model. We would want to see metallurgical recoveries and a meaningful tungsten resource before assuming any value uplift.

Still, the combination of a growing gold resource, a possible critical-mineral by-product and one of the bigger active drill programs in the country is a reasonable setup heading into the next 12 months of news flow.

The Investors Takeaway for Benz Mining Corp

The geological case for tungsten at Glenburgh now looks well established. The next test is whether ALS Metallurgy can confirm that coarse scheelite and ferberite recover cleanly through a gravity circuit at industrial scale. That single dataset will determine whether tungsten becomes a line item in a future scoping study or just a footnote in the JORC table.

Beyond that, the resource update from the expanded drill program is the catalyst that drives the equity. Investors who want broader coverage of ASX gold explorers and emerging critical-mineral plays can find more at stocksdownunder.

Our view is that Benz Mining is now a two-pronged story. Gold remains the main game, but the tungsten optionality is real enough that it should not be ignored when sizing the position.