The scale of the Mirage project of Brunswick Exploration Inc for now opens the potential for an onsite milling facility to produce a spodumene concentrate, but if Mirage does fall short, it could end up being a spoke that feeds the Renard processing hub. While so far the dykes intersected have not screamed tonnage volume, the 2% plus bonanza grades would be helpful in justifying the trucking of raw ore to Renard. The main benefit of Winsome's Renard deal for Brunswick is that it forces the Quebec government to think hard and quickly about the infrastructure development of the James Bay region if it is to become a major pegmatite sourced lithium supplier in 2030 and beyond when timing for exponential mass adoption of EVs is plausible. Mirage is further north than Adina but a spur would connect it to the La Grande Alliance Road between Renard and the Trans Taiga Highway.
Brunswick announced on January 22, 2024 that it had initiated a drill program at Mirage which will test a 2.8 km by 2.0 km area where spodumene bearing outcrop has been identified. Last year's drilling tested only a 2 km segment on the 100% owned claims which intersected 3 distinct dykes with 2.0%+ bonanza grades. Much of this delineation drilling will assess this dyke swarm to a vertical extent of 250 metres, perhaps with sufficient density to yield a resource estimate. When I talked to CEO Killian Charles this past week he said the program was a week away from wrapping up and there was a slight chance Brunswick might drill a couple scout holes beneath the 3 km boulder train that begins at the southwestern limit of the delineation target drilling area about whose results the market turned out to be not overly impressed. In fact, so far this year every time Brunswick has put out a news release it triggered a new round of selling. So the perception has emerged that Mirage is going to be another Jamar, with the high grades getting sacrificed to deliver critical mass tonnage. Surprisingly, although the market shrugged a couple weeks ago when Brunswick announced staking lots of additional pegmatite targets in Quebec as well as in Greenland, this week Brunswick had its best upside day of the year when the Winsome Renard news came out.
Although one could have guessed from the January news release that testing 2.8 km of strike with pegmatite outcrops meant Brunswick would be drilling the 75% optioned Osisko inlier claims (since spun out into a new Sean Roosen deal called Electric Elements Mining Corp), Brunswick has not made a lot of noise about this strike expansion drilling which may have passed right through the Osisko claims back onto 100% owned ground. When Brunswick finishes drilling this month it will provide a drill exploration summary for Mirage that may surprise the market. The area has a series of narrow lakes which track the ice direction, which by coincidence may also be a structural trend of weakness that would have attracted the emplacement of wandering pegmatites. These lakes would have been frozen enough to allow drilling from ice to track the pegmatites efficiently. We may hear of additional parallel dykes within the segment of the swarm drilled last year. The surprise potential lies within what was found on the Osisko inlier claims onto which the dyke swarm extends.
Killian Charles wouldn't provide any details, but one important detail he did share was to answer in the negative if any of the drilling has intersected pegmatite with the same micaceous mineralogy as the big boulder field that begins where the dyke swarm disappears under overburden. If Brunswick has marched its drill 3 km beyond the head of that prominent boulder train and found lots of well mineralized pegmatite lacking the micaceous mineralogy, it has deepened the mystery of the origin of these boulders which were assumed to have been glacially transported from an up ice source. In fact it boosts the chance that maybe these boulders have not been transported by ice at all, but may be sitting on top of the source from which they were broken by weathering and eventually frost-heaved to the surface as this zone structural zone filled with overburden. Killian was unsure if it was worthwhile to drill a couple blind high risk scout holes, and I suspect it is because Brunswick will have a lot to talk about when the winter drill program results are released. It might be much better to line up a scout drill for the summer to drill a systematic fence to sort out what is going on in bedrock beneath the overburden. |
