The main new development everybody is looking for, namely a lifting of the forest access closures, has not happened yet. The main problem is that the western part of James Bay still has an extreme fire danger according to SOPFEU, as a result of which the Billy Diamond Highway remains closed. Although the Trans Taiga Highway which runs east-west in the north James Bay area to service the hydroelectric infrastructure is open, that is of no help because access via Billy Diamond remains closed. The Quebec government's SOPFEU fire map is not well endowed with explanatory legends, but I had somebody explain the legend system. The eastern part of the James Bay region now has a low fire danger though the western part along the eastern side of James Bay has high to extreme fire danger. The irregular red outlined areas are fires that are being "observed", meaning they are being let to burn out on their own because they do not threaten infrastructure. Those that are solid red are still burning actively while those with just a red outline are fading.
There is talk that the Billy Diamond Highway will soon open which will allow road transport to the greenstone belts along the Corvette "trend", which is critical because it will allow boots on the ground which do not need helicopter support to begin prospecting. Companies such as Dios Exploration Inc which were set to do helicopter supported prospecting on their eastern claims by mid August have been notified that there will be a delay of at least another week due to a shortage of helicopters. The Canada wide Interactive Fire Map shows that British Columbia, Yukon and Northwest Territories are now forest fire hotspots. The Yukon, already constrained by a very short exploration season, is now seeing drill programs curtailed because helicopters are being requisitioned to fight its fires. Between First Nation aggression and forest fires the resource juniors operating in Canada are having a tough time, hampered by a market that has become very subdued. Juniors in the James Bay region are consoling themselves with silver lining jokes about how next summer when the winter-spring rains have washed away all the soot there will be a bounty of visible pegmatites previously obscured by brush and moss. Some are already making arrangements for commercial satellite photos next May-June.
At the moment the main hope for major discovery news resides with Brunswick Exploration Inc which has had boots on the ground at its Mirage spodumene boulder field for two weeks now. The stock price has started to sag after a burst of market interest over a week ago when theJuniorExplorer published an hour long interview with Brunswick's CEO Killian Charles. Killian doesn't reveal any secrets about Mirage but the interview does a very good job explaining why what I call Lithium Mania 2.0, the search for lithium pegmatites in places like Canada which don't make anybody's list of where the 600% supply expansion required for 2030 EV deployment goals is supposed to come from, has barely started. It is especially valuable for individuals who feel they missed the lithium boat because they didn't own Patriot Battery Metals Corp. Although investors have been reluctant to act, juniors have scrambled to acquire land in the James Bay region during the past year. I have identified 54 public companies with land in Quebec's James Bay region and created the KRO James Bay Lithium Index with August 1, 2023 as the effective date ($1,000 worth of stock was bought for each company and the index was set at 1,000). The index has been back-dated to December 30, 2022. The index members begin with equal weighting because the point of the index is to identify and track emerging lithium discoveries. I see the James Bay Great Canadian Area Play as the ultimate and final mineral exploration boom ideally suited for the resource junior eco-system which is on its deathbed.
Some of the companies are truly awful pukeworthy juniors which you can tell from the nature of the property deals they have done and the IR contracts in management's history that a pump and dump is the primary objective of exposure to the James Bay Great Canadian Area Play. I decided to include all of them because the nature of the lithium pegmatite hunt is such where the most horrible junior could actually make a world class discovery, so long as they go to the trouble to put boots on the ground. And even that may not be necessary because a serious junior next door might find a CV5 equivalent pegmatite projecting onto the lifestyle junior's property. I've even included gold or base metals focused juniors not (yet) interested in lithium because the kind of geology prospective for those metals in many cases is also prospective for LCT type pegmatites. In fact what makes Lithium Mania 2.0 such a compelling story is that countless pegmatites were noted through the course of past exploration but ignored because as recently as 2005 the annual lithium market was worth only $200 million compared to $20 billion in 2022, and amply supplied by Australia's Greenbushes pegmatite monster and the brines in the Chilean part of South America's Lithium Triangle.
I will be regularly sharing the KRO James Bay Lithium Index chart on Kaiser Watch and talking about important developments, but the KRO James Bay Lithium Index web page and associated comments will be available only to KRO members, which costs USD $450 annually for an individual membership and $1,000 for a corporate multi-user membership.
The big news for the James Bay region was an updated resource estimate from Allkem Limited for its James Bay (Galaxy-Cyr) deposit published on August 11, 2023. The main resource, which stops just west of the Billy Diamond Highway and for which a feasibility study has already been done, increased from indicated 40.3 million tonnes at 1.4% Li2O using a 0.62% cutoff in the December 2021 feasibility study to 54.3 million tonnes @ 1.3% indicated and 25.3 million tonnes @ 1.15% inferred using a 0.5% cutoff grade. The big surprise, however, was the NW Sector which yielded 30.7 million tonnes @ 1.42% inferred. We only heard of this zone in 2023 when Allkem published intersections with higher grades than we saw with the main zone. Somehow Lithium One and Galaxy both missed this blind jog to the northwest while they delineated a set of 200-400 m long pegmatite dykes oriented north-south within an east-west deformation corridor. The NW Sector remains open at depth and along strike in a northwest direction. When the two zones are combined Allkem has 110.2 million tonnes of 1.3% Li2O in indicated and inferred categories containing in situ 1,430,000 tonnes of Li2O, which is equivalent to 3,536,000 tonnes of lithium carbonate or 664,000 tonnes of lithium metal (2022 global supply was 120,000 tonnes of metal).
The significance of the NW Sector resource is that if the Main Zone did not happen to be outcropping nearby to the extent it is visible with Google Earth, finding it would have required second order exploration methods which combine multiple data sets to vector in on high probability locations for LCT-pegmatites, followed by detailed boots on the ground prospecting. The northern half of James Bay where PMET's Corvette project is located involves first order exploration where all it may take is to look hard at something seen in the past but ignored because there was no demand for lithium. The NW Sector shows that second order exploration in the southern half of James Bay by groups like Brunswick and Dios can bear high grade fruit with large tonnage implications.
One missing aspect of the Allkem update was the lack of any mention about drilling within the deformation corridor east of the Billy Diamond Highway. The map shows three drill holes to the east of the Main Zone described as testing the limit, which means the Main Zone does not cross the highway. But Allkem did drill holes farther east right up to the boundary with Brunswick's Anatacau West property where Brunswick successfully demonstrated that the set of 200-400 m en echelon lithium pegmatite dykes continues for at least 300 m eastwards within the deformation corridor. Allkem has now completely surrounded the Anatacau West claim block. Allkem and Livent expect to complete their merger later this year which may be when the new Allkem Livent plc will be in a position to acquire Brunswick's Anatacau West claim block. |
