I think that the penny is dropping for investors on how the largest and purest lithium deposit globally can affect the lithium space. We have a capacity to expand to 40 Mtpa and are planning an initial10 Mtpa plant!
Currently AVZ has 400 [email protected]% Li2O and an exploration target of 1.5 billion tonnes that Managing Director of AVZ Nigel Ferguson says can be achieved easily. Only 10% of pegmatites have been drilled and we already have the largest easily expandable resource in the world(homogenous, lowest strip ratio, at and near surface with the lowest impurities-easy and cheap to mine and convert to battery grade lithium).High-level independent metallurgical test verification of Manono's lower iron, fluorine and phosphorous levels - and projected significantly lower open pit stripping rates - underline the incredible latent value in the DRC project.
"We think this project is completely different to every other project out there because it is so large - we're not talking about 10m-wide zones, it's 200m," says Ferguson.
"But it's not just about being the biggest in the pack, it's very much about that scale translating into value, which comes back to quality.
"It's the nature of the beast at Manono, with such a big, wide [pegmatite] body; it's cooled slowly, so we've got large crystals and a cleaner pegmatite. We've literally got, one side to the other, a single zone, and the wall rocks are black,and the pegmatite is white … so we can just strip it down either side and not worry too much about dilution. It's pretty much 1.65% all the way through!
"SCT, which has designed about 85% of all the hydroxide plants in the world, have said they've never seen such a clean product - just really high grade and no detrimentals of any issue whatsoever. We have low fluorine, very low phosphorous, the iron is down to 0.4% in the product … and we'll probably get that down further with more tweaking. There is 2-4% mica in the body itself, but once it's processed it's down to … less than 1.5% mica, and we'll get that down further too."
Exciting times for AVZ holders!
AIMO