Galan Lithium has firmed-up the geological pegmatite model at its 100 per cent-owned Greenbushes South project in Western Australia, with Fry’s Block assays suggesting similarity to the globally-renowned Greenbushes deposit.
The company says Greenbushes, one of the world’s biggest and highest-grade hard-rock lithium operations, is about 5km to the north and on the same regional geological structure. Unsurprisingly, more drilling is now planned to test new pegmatite targets.
Following extensive fieldwork and geochemical and geophysical data analysis, Galan completed eight diamond-core drillholes for 3885m at its Fry’s Block target that boasts anomalously high lithium concentrations in soil samples and outcropping pegmatites and also has favourable land access.
The program was originally designed for only 2500m of diamond core, but it was extended by an additional 1385m to take advantage of rig availability and to further validate the company’s exploration model.
Galan says it has now received the final set of assays from the drilling campaign and about 25 per cent of the recovered core has been classified as pegmatite, characterised by the abundance of minerals associated with the spodumene-bearing pegmatites at Greenbushes.
Management says that while the pegmatite intersections are not significantly enriched in lithium-caesium-tantalum (LCT) to an extent consistent with “mineralised” LCT pegmatites or granite, it does show a trend towards some enrichment in those elements.
On the back of the results, the company says it is developing additional targets for its next drilling campaign at Greenbushes South and will engage NewGen Geo to develop a geophysical campaign to calibrate existing drilling data.
The Greenbushes South project covers an area of about 315 square kilometres and is about 250km south of Perth and 100km south-east of Bunbury. Both cities have deepwater ports and sealed road access.
Significantly, the project tenements are strategically located along the Donnybrook-Bridgetown shear zone, a regional geological structure that trends north-west/south-east and hosts lithium-bearing pegmatites at the massive Greenbushes mine.
Greenbushes is widely considered to be one of the world's premier lithium mineral assets and has a long history of mining, with the operation dating back to the late 1800s. The deposit has a resource of 360 million tonnes at a grade of 1.5 per cent lithium oxide.
The first lithium mining began at Greenbushes in 1983 and in 2021, it produced about 38 per cent of the world's hard-rock lithium product. In the 2022 financial year, the mine produced 1.14 million tonnes of spodumene concentrate.
Galan is also continuing with global lithium exploration efforts at its flagship Hombre Muerto West lithium brine project in the Catamarca Province within the world-renowned “Lithium Triangle” in Argentina.
Last month, the company revealed long-term pumping test results that produced an outstanding lithium mean grade of 981 milligrams per litre at 15 litres per second – the highest reported grade from a production well in the Hombre Muerto Salar.
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