Si6 Metals has confirmed it is now the co-owner of 10 prime Brazilian exploration licenses covering a massive 17,000 hectares prospective for lithium, rare earths, gold, base metals and platinum group elements.
The company today revealed it had completed a deal with Foxfire Metals to pick up a 50 per cent share in that company’s portfolio of exploration licences in Brazil. As part of the agreement, Foxfire will manage the joint venture (JV) and be free-carried through to a “bankable” feasibility study, while Si6 – through its fully-owned subsidiary Brazilian Ventures –will be initially required to spend $1 million in the first year of the combined operation.
Si6 Metals managing director Jim Malone said: “The Company is excited about commencing the initial exploration program at the highly-prospective Caldera REE Project. The “Lithium Valley” program will take place close to S-Type G4 supersuite granites that are typically known to host lithium in spodumene bearing pegmatites.”
The JV is wasting no time in getting to work, with plans to start exploring ground this month in the Caldera rare earths project area, which sits within the State of Minas Gerais. It then plans to be working ground in the Jequitinhonha Valley, which holds the country’s biggest lithium reserves and is known globally as the “Lithium Valley”.
That name has come about due to some mind-blowing lithium numbers published by competitors following exploration efforts in the area.
One such example is Sigma Lithium’s massive Grota do Cirilo lithium project that is reported to contain a mineral resource of 85.6 million tonnes grading 1.43 per cent lithium oxide – putting it among the biggest and highest-grade hard rock lithium deposits on Earth.
Sigma has modelled an annual output of 766,000 tonnes at Grota do Cirilo, placing it in the top five lithium producers in the world. The first shipment of battery-grade lithium spodumene concentrate from the project set sail in May last year.
Latin Resources is also in the area working up a 70.3-million-tonne resource grading 1.27 per cent lithium oxide, which it is planning to commercialise with a 3.6-million-tonne per year mining and processing operation. That would establish the company as Brazil’s second-biggest spodumene concentrate producer.
Si6 has now joined in on a stronghold of five tenements in the Jequitinhonha Valley where the JV will be hunting a lithium resource capable of mirroring the global-scale success of its nearby competitors.
The JV’s immediate focus will be at two of its fresh tenements in the Caldera area near Meteoric Resources’ monster Caldeira ionic-adsorption clay-hosted rare earths project that boasts a mineral resource estimate of 409 million tonnes grading 2626 parts per million total rare earth oxides (TREO).
Rare earths enrichment at Caldeira begins from surface and Meteoric says it is the world’s highest-grade ionic-adsorption clay rare earths discovery. Interestingly, the TREO within the clays contains an impressive 22 per cent magnetic rare earth oxides – the highly sought-after elements used in the magnetic components of electric motors.
Another two of the JV’s tenements are in north-eastern Brazil in the Ceará Pedra Brancha in Ceará State. The project areas sit adjacent to ValOre Metals’ inferred mineral resource estimate of 63.6 million tonnes at 2.2 million ounces of palladium, in addition to some platinum and gold.
Si6 says several of the mineralised zones in Ceará remain open and will be the target of future drill programs. The JV has more than 20 exploration targets and several additional untested anomalies throughout the district.
One piece of ground is in a vastly underexplored 40-square-kilometre patch of the Southern Amazon near the town of Apuí – known locally for historical gold mining and the site of a gold rush on the Juma River in 2007. A reverse-circulation (RC) test hole drilled there by Foxfire to 88m returned anomalous rare earths mineralisation from surface to the end-of-hole.
Although under explored and somewhat remote, the Amazon tenement is only about 15km from Apuí, where excellent infrastructure can support operations including direct access to the highway, a commercial airport and a river port.
Nabbing half of a huge landholding in true frontier exploration ground will make this year an exciting time for Si6 and its shareholders, with news flow sure to be thick and fast out of a proven exploration domain.
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By Andrew Duffy
