These are excellent results.
Very good grades at very shallow depths.
Better than I thought.
Now we can talk better in detail by facts in hand. As I said before IR1 has been the first lithium stock I bought in in 5 years after I bought in LTR. It looked to me that it had very good potential. I think I will be proven right.
These results are not surprising for me because the spodumene was everywhere at the surface of Beecher and Longview. They have been mined for more than 100 years as well.
It's not only those two locations which have a lots of spodumene occurrences and even mining, IR1 has much more than that. There is Edison project at Keystone location which is also know by spodumene mining, there is Helen Beryl, there is Tin Mountain which is actually my favorite (but it will be explored much later I guess). And there is more actually.
I think this is going to a big one. You can read my old posts here on IR1 threads to see the importance of Black Hills location.
The importance of these results (which is only 8 of 38 holes, 32 holes assays are coming soon too) is that
the spodumene starts from surface. That's the first key for easy mining.
The second important thing is
IR1 has got mining licences for these properties. That's the main key.
And also these results for only Longview deposit, we still haven't received the assay results of Beecher deposit.
We are still waiting the results of thick intersections of pegmatite were logged at both the Longview (88m true width) and the Black Diamond (107m downhole width*). Assays are yet to be received for these pegmatite intersections.
When I looked at the rock chip photos I saw the spod rocks look very good in colour (more whiteish) which indicates little impurities (the different colours like pink or green indicate different impurities content in it like iron, potassium etc.)
The importance of surface mineralisation at high grade is so much important! When you look at the resource of companies like PMT (Patriot Battery Metals), WR1, all at Quebec James Bay area, their deposits, especially the high grade sections are located at very deep sections. It'd be very high cost to mine those pegmatites at those remote locations and at the frozen county. I'm highly doubtful that those projects will be economically mined. That's why I never touched them.
As I also stated before South Dakota is at the hearth of the US, and the area is mining friendly. These deposits here can be easily mined. There is no other hard rock spodumene project in the US like this one.
We may see the majors like Albemarle and Exxon Mobil will turn their eyes on this project soon. I hope they won't see it early.
Here is the map of other North American projects. They are all in frozen country.
