Ann: Significant Increase to Finniss Resources and Reserves, page-146

A good but not fantastic announcement on a down day for lithium stocks.

This announcement is inherently written by geologists using JORC rules. These JORC rules are there for good reasons - to avoid speculation that could be misleading. What it however means is the JORC increase captures what can be shown by existing drilling results. It doesn't really capture what is speculated and hopefully confirmed in future drilling across 2022 and 2023. For several of Core's deposits they have a strong idea that there are a lot more reserve tons to added, but the drilling and modelling hasn't been completed as at 12 July 2022.

As context, back in 6 May 2019 Core included the paragraph below. All the reserves noted in this announcement were part of this 2019 announcement. This announcement also included three deposits that are yet to get developed to reserve status (Bilato's, Saffums1 & Far West Central)
"Lithium mineralisation has been identified historically as occurring at Bilato’s (Picketts) and Saffums 1 (both amblygonite) but more recently LTR and CXO have identified spodumene at numerous other prospects, including Grants, BP33, Booths, Lees, Hang Gong, Ah Hoy, Far West Central and Sandras."

So this announcement isn't bringing any newer discoveries in, its improving what has been known about for several years. The announcement:

• Shifted Ah Hoy into reserve status
• Had a good but not huge increase Reserve and Resource increase for BP33
• Shifted some of Carlton into Resource status and increased the overall size (but not by enough to prevent Reserves less resource falling)
• Made 0.5Mt or smaller increases in other reserves

There are further JORC resource increases are to come. Far West Central, Far West North and Bilato's would appear the most likely to be drilled further and have mining plans for them developed so they can become a resource and ultimately reserve. If Core wasn't spending substantial energy getting into production this year, its probable at least one of these would have been developed further.

BP33
In some ways this was a disappointment to have only increased 1.1Mt. Drilling the open directions would appear to have the potential to add multi-million ton volumes but this requires more than a couple of deep drill holes, even if those drill holes have had great results. And that is the disconnect in this announcement, Core strongly suspects there is a big upgrade to BP33 from drilling out the open directions. More drilling (and mine planning) is needed before this can become a JORC upgrade.

A summary table of the shifts: