Gold Mountain has reported more promising lithium results from a batch of stream sediment samples at its Salinas II project in Brazil’s emerging Lithium Valley in a frenzied week of news-making activity for the company.
Management says all but one of its 55 samples collected returned significant lithium anomalism, with the highest concentrations being found at the company’s Bananal Valley tenements. The company says the potential for significantly mineralised lithium-caesium-tantalum (LCT) pegmatites is high at the project as the area lies along regional strike from Latin Resources’ big, high-grade Colina deposit.
Colina features 70.9 million tonnes of lithium oxide at 1.25 per cent for a total 2.2 million tonnes of lithium carbonate equivalent (LCE).
Gold Mountain believes the extent of magnetic and geological structures in the directions of Latin’s “lithium corridor” suggests multiple parallel lithium pegmatite zones are likely. Latin’s recent tenement pegging surrounding Gold Mountain – and at times even overlapping its tenements – in the same region, suggests that company is of the same belief.
Peak lithium values of 672 parts per million and 547ppm were returned by Gold Mountain at Bananal Valley, with a high of 226ppm coming from its Agua Boa tenement. Sample coverage of the Agua Boa tenement is now complete, but the two high-grade results obtained from the Bananal Valley tenement are expected to be accompanied shortly by a further 38 samples.
The high values were the only two results received to date from the 40 samples covering the Bananal Valley tenement area.
The company will plan follow-up field programs once the sum of lithium results is combined with LCT pegmatite-associated element pathfinders – such as caesium, rubidium and tantalum – to rank the highest-priority targets. The approach has already successfully identified a 4km-long zone of the most anomalous responses that will form the principal initial follow-up mapping and soil sampling ahead of drill targeting at Bananal Valley.
Interestingly, previous mapping at Bananal Valley identified pegmatites and artisanal workings within Gold Mountain’s tenements. It suggests the stream sediment sampling method can be used as an effective vector for Gold Mountain in targeting LCTs across the Lithium Valley.
Its latest news comes in a week when it has also reported solid results relating to rare earths, copper and lithium at a handful of its other Brazilian targets.
Gold Mountain managing director David Evans said: “These are exceptional first results from stream sediment sampling in the Lithium Valley, it confirms GMN’s tenements are prospective and has the potential to host high-grade LCT pegmatites akin to the neighbouring Latin Resources Colina project.”
The company says its highly-prospective rare earths, niobium, copper and lithium licenses located within the eastern Brazilian lithium belt, spread through parts of the Borborema Province and São Francisco Craton in north-eastern Brazil all the way south-east to the Salinas area in the State of Minas Gerais.
The recently-coined Lithium Valley lies within south-eastern Minas Gerais. It is home to about 85 percent of the lithium reserves in Brazil – the world's fifth-biggest producer of the metal that is an essential ingredient in electric vehicle (EV) batteries.
The Salinas project is accessible by major sealed roads and is in the Bananal Valley, 600km north-east of Belo Horizonte. Regional structures that have been demonstrated to control pegmatites are recognised throughout the Lithium Valley and Gold Mountain believes that its 43 tenements here have the strategic covering of areas prospective for parallel trends in the Salinas.
With lithium having been slightly on the nose and at significantly depreciated prices this year, results like Gold Mountain’s today may not excite the market as much as recent years gone by. However, there is no doubt the global economy will need large, quality, high-grade lithium deposits – such as Latin Resources’ Colina play – to supply the growing EV market.
And Gold Mountain seems to be in the right region of Brazil to find another one.
Is your ASX-listed company doing something interesting? Contact: matt.birney@businessnews.com.au
By Andrew Todd
