St George Mining has completed a soil sampling and rock chip program over a previously untested area of its flagship Mt Alexander project with assay results expected about mid-January.
The company said the results will provide the final piece of the puzzle in the planning for its next drill program at Mt Alexander which is scheduled for the following month.
The soil and rock chip sampling programs complete what has been a busy year for St George which included a $3 million investment from leading battery producer Amperex Technology (ATL) in return for an initial 10 per cent stake in the company’s Lithium Star group of projects.
St George also confirmed plans for continued development at Destiny, a 3,000 square kilometre landholding south-west of Kalgoorlie where a high-grade rare earths discovery, announced just weeks ago, identified numerous potentially lithium-bearing pegmatites.
The company has outlined a full book of exploration for early 2024 with all three projects set to feel the hard edge of the drill bit.
Market watchers will be keen observers of developments at Mt Alexander, located 120km south-west of WA’s Agnew-Wiluna Belt which hosts numerous world-class nickel deposits and where previous exploration has confirmed the presence of high-grade lithium and pegmatites up to 121m thick, pointing to the possibility of a large pegmatite-hosted lithium-rich system.
Importantly, St George notes only a small fraction of Mt Alexander’s 16km strike has been subject to drilling which it says presents some significant exploration upside along the regional-scale lithium-caesium-tantalum (LCT) corridor.
St George says field mapping and systematic rock-chip sampling have been completed recently on several new targets in one joint venture licence and on three of its 100 per cent owned tenements.
Its previous exploration has prioritised targets along the contact of the Mt Alexander greenstone sequence with the Copperfield Granite which St George considers an analogue to the Copperfield Granite at Delta Lithium’s lithium deposit located at Mt Ida.
The company’s exploration has also included extensive pegmatite swarms in the northern and central portions of the Mt Alexander greenstones, successfully identifying more than 400 pegmatites from aerial imagery.
Separately, St George’s Destiny landholding is also a relatively underexplored area covering more than 90km of strike along the Ida Fault – a major regional scale shear zone known to be prospective for significant lithium, gold and base metal deposits.
The company’s maiden drilling at Destiny hit widespread rare earths mineralisation in saprolitic clays up to 100m thick carrying grades exceeding 500ppm total rare earths oxides (TREO) in 42 of the 61 holes drilled, with a best intercept of 2m at a grade of 5,125ppm TREO from 32m downhole within a broader interval of 30m running 1,885ppm TREO from 20m downhole.
St George says it has only drill-tested about 7km of the 90km long trend, describing the potential of the trend as “substantial” with plans already sketched for further drilling in the early new year.
The work will continue to target greenstone sequences, including mapped ultramafics, at the contact zone with the potentially fertile granitoids east of the Ida Fault. These are priority exploration areas for potential lithium mineralisation, as proven by the recent spodumene discovery by Neometals at its Spargos Project.
St George’s Lithium Star tenement portfolio contains seven hard-rock lithium projects widely distributed across prospective regions of the south-west of Western Australia. Its three priority targets include Myuna Rocks south-east of Kalgoorlie, Split Rock west of Kalgoorlie and Buningonia south/south-east of Kalgoorlie, where pre-drilling fieldwork has already taken place with all three scheduled for drilling in the new year.
Management says it sees significant potential in the Lithium Star properties and that ATL’s 10 per cent stake in the portfolio has given it a major boost in unlocking the value of the Lithium Star project portfolio.
A delegation from ATL visited Perth and project sites earlier in December, adding further support for a commitment to advance exploration at the Lithium Star projects.
The new year is shaping as a busy time for St George with multiple drill programs planned across multiple projects all designed to put some meat on the targets it has identified so far. Logistically, the company’s tenement layout centred generally around Kalgoorlie will help it to cover territory with reasonable efficiency which should help the company achieve the sizeable exploration goals it has set itself for 2024.
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By Doug Bright
